he world is starting to understand that there is no way to fully and lastingly protect itself from President Donald Trump.

The man just can’t let things go — and he’ll get creative to get what he wants.

The latest blowup over Ukraine is emblematic of Trump’s wily persistence, and it suggests a challenging two years lie ahead for the international set even if Democrats gain some power in the midterm elections.

Not that long ago, Trump seemed to have patched up ties with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Kyiv made gains against Russia. Trump signed legislation last month that was championed by his late friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to impose heavy new sanctions and tariffs to punish Russia for its war on Ukraine.

This month, the original Trump — the one who fawns over Russian leader Vladimir Putin and despises Zelenskyy — roared back. He waived many of the legislation’s penalties on Russia, moved to buy Russian diesel and signaled he’s more interested in doing business with Moscow than seeking justice for Kyiv. Ukrainians suspect the U.S. has pressured them by throttling its satellite connections and intelligence-sharing. (The Trump administration disputes much of this.)

“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Trump said Monday as he welcomed the idea of an arms control summit with Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that might include talks about Ukraine.

The lesson, foreign officials and others steeped in diplomacy tell me, is that you cannot truly change Trump’s mind or stop his overall trajectory. Even if Trump seems briefly chastened or stages a tactical retreat, he will eventually return in new, often-surprising modes to push his original views and goals. He will try to exhaust you into submission.

Imagine how startling it is to be Ukrainian these days as Trump pressures you to make concessions to Russia by blaming you for a global energy crisis he caused by launching a war on Iran. Or what it’s like for officials across European capitals trying to craft a response, knowing there’s never an end to the process.

“There is no immunity to Donald Trump. He makes a deal in order to make a better deal the next day,” one senior European official mused, having been granted anonymity because the topic involves sensitive diplomacy.

It’s hard to blame world leaders who think they’ve learned to manage Trump only to be bewildered by a sudden left hook on his part. Foreign policy is often driven by hope when you lack good options. And Trumpology is a confounding, but still a relatively new, subfield.

Besides, Trump’s messaging is inconsistent, incoherent and nonstrategic — characteristics that can obscure his single-minded pursuit of his goals. So the global actors dealing with him — whether it’s the Gulf Arab states who shower him with gifts or the Canadians furious over his trade and territorial threats — sometimes think they’ve come to terms with him only to find they’re fighting on a newly configured plane.

A Supreme Court ruling that gutted many of Trump’s tariffs earlier this year was good news in many capitals. But since then, the so-called Tariff Man has moved to impose the import taxes under pretexts not considered by the court, including turning to accusations involving forced labor.

The White House doesn’t dispute Trump’s aggressive tactics.

“There is no greater fighter for America First interests than President Trump — and he is willing to look anyone in the eye to deliver wins on behalf of the United States,” spokesperson Anna Kelly told me in a statement.

The Greenland saga shows the limits of trying to mollify Trump.

In his first term, Trump wanted to buy the frozen island. The idea was shelved amid global laughter, but authorities in Greenland and Denmark made it clear to Trump that they welcomed more U.S. investment in the Danish territory.

In his second term, Trump huffed and puffed about an all-out U.S. takeover of Greenland, only to agree in September to an expanded U.S. military footprint that he could have gotten anyway under existing, decades-old diplomatic accords without all the drama. The whole affair has led to lingering anger in Europe about what Canada’s leader called a “rupture” in the global order — but many European officials hoped that the saga had faded away.

Yet, it’s far from certain that Trump has given up on possessing Greenland. Just days ago, he touted on social media plans to start oil, gas and mineral exploration in “our new and beautiful Greenland.”

The use of “our” is more than a little suggestive.

Defying Trump, too, can get you only so far.

Brazilians effectively told Trump to take a hike when he used tariffs and sanctions to punish the country for charging its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in a coup attempt.

A few months later, as Bolsonaro was about to start his prison sentence, Trump seemed to admit defeat in his effort to help his political ally. “That’s too bad,” he said in November 2025, with little emotion. (“Brazil Defied Trump and Won,” The New York Times declared.)

But Trump wasn’t done with Brazil. He and his team have pursued efforts to undercut the current Brazilian government while quietly backing Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, in his efforts to win the presidency this year. The runoff election is on Sunday, and it’s tight.

World leaders are doing what they can to make their countries Trump-resistant, if not all-out Trump-proof.

That has meant everything from diversifying their sources of trade and security alliances to joining Trump on ventures that, on the surface at least, can be helpful to them. (Then there are the many countries, especially in Africa, that diplomats privately tell me are happy to be off Trump’s radar.)

My takeaway from watching all of this, though, is that it’s not enough to stay one step ahead of Trump. You have to stay several steps ahead, and you have to be wildly imaginative about the lengths to which Trump and his devoted aides are willing to go to complicate your life.

The second Trump administration is filled with people who have turned to unique, bizarre and clever interpretations of law and reality to push his agenda. It’s not always clear who is behind which move, but it’s hard to imagine Trump isn’t fine with most of what’s happening.

It’s why a teenager is being held in immigration detention for the actions of his grandmother decades ago. It’s why Congress can scream and shout about its spending orders yet Trump ignores it.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said other nations should not hope that the Republican Party will shed Trump’s worldview, including his disdain for allies, once Trump’s out of power.

“I would love for our allies to know that we have consistent common adversaries that we’re going to work together to fight. I just don’t know that you can make that guarantee,” Murphy, a frequent Trump critic, told me. “That’s painful to say, but given the state of the Republican Party right now, it’s true.”

I understand why Ukraine and the European Union are trying to diversify their sources of intelligence and military industrial bases as Trump keeps chasing love from Russia.

Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims, the reality is that the United States can no longer be trusted for such security assistance.

But it’s not enough to find new intelligence partners or weapons manufacturers. You have to ask bigger questions, like, “What are the untapped streams of intelligence that no one knows are out there? What’s a potential weapon no one has considered? How can I acquire what I need before Trump stops me?”

Governments need to have plans — now — for scenarios that seem completely crazy. Better to be wrong than unprepared.

Still, even if you do all of that … “I don’t think it’s possible to stay two or three steps ahead of Trump,” said Charles Kupchan, a former senior national security official during the Obama administration who apparently enjoys raining on parades.

“He acts on impulse,” argued Kupchan, who has a new book out on the crumbling world order. “We need to try to limit the damage he’s causing and ride him out.”

A Democratic win in November’s midterms — one or both chambers of Congress — is unlikely to do much to rein in Trump’s actions abroad during his final years, current and former U.S. and foreign officials tell me.

He still has the veto and has been willing to ignore congressional demands. There’s also the fact that presidents have significantly more power to act in unilateral ways overseas than they do domestically.

Ukraine, the European Union, the world — all will be dealing with a politically wounded Trump who’s likely to double down on what he feels he must have.

“He’s going to be angrier,” Murphy predicted.

Today, I’m talking to Bill Gates, cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation.

You may have noticed Bill in the news more lately — he’s been on something of a tour for the past few months, ever since publishing an essay in late August titled “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.”

In his piece, Gates ratcheted up his rhetoric around AI safety, writing that “even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history.”

In interviews since, Gates has called AI “the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near,” and that AI “makes nuclear weapons look like nothing.” It is clear he does not think the current policy response from the White House, or the lack of coordinated efforts from the AI industry itself, is sufficient to combat this threat.

So I wanted to know: Is Bill Gates an AI doomer? I also had a series of questions downstream from what he’s been arguing about AI. How can we ever hope to control AI, and align it to humanity, if we can’t even agree on what it is and whether it’s conscious? How would you even technically construct a solution to alignment that could be enforced, not just for closed-source models but open-source ones, too?

Bill gave us a big chunk of his time to dig into these issues with him, and the resulting conversation is a really illuminating one. He thinks we need to prepare for roughly two decades of AI disruption, and he says this period could be so painful it might split society in two — between people comfortable living near the technological frontier, and those who reject it.

We also talked about the labor considerations, the nihilism of younger generations toward technological progress, and what should make us hopeful about the future. This is a deep one.

Okay: Bill Gates, the cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Bill Gates, you are the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft. You’re also the chairman of the Gates Foundation. Welcome to Decoder.

Thank you.

It’s good to talk to you again. You and I have spoken many times over the years. I would say that the circumstances of this conversation feel very different. Previously, when you and I would talk, you were always very hopeful about technology and what it could bring.

You had a Netflix series a few years ago. You talked to The Verge, and I want to just read you this quote. You said, “I believe AI is a beneficial thing, we just need to shape it in the right way.” I would say you still agree with that, you just think the time to shape it is now.

Yeah, I agree with that. I’d say the response broadly hasn’t been adequate to the speed that the challenge is arising. I’m very concerned that the bad stuff will not be minimized and that a lot of good stuff could come fairly slowly if we don’t manage it the right way.

I’m very concerned that the bad stuff will not be minimized and that a lot of good stuff could come fairly slowly if we don’t manage it the right way

I want to have this conversation with you in three parts. I want to understand how you feel about AI as a technology today and why it’s advancing so quickly. I’m very curious about the technology, and the technical solutions to potentially control it. There are policy solutions as well, but it seems like we have to build an awful lot of technology.

I’m also very curious to talk about who might impose those solutions and controls, because that seems very much up for debate right now as well. So let’s just start at the start. What has made you feel the urgency that AI is arriving at a speed that means we’re not ready to control it?

The progress over the last year has been really quite amazing, starting with the ability to write code and find cyber flaws, the ability to reason in biology, the ability to form relationships with kids or other people, the ability to disrupt the job market. The incredible power that exists today means that every one of those things will happen and society needs to be ready.

Do you see that happening as a technology as a whole or in the products that are instantiated by the companies that are making AI today?

What I mean is that AI is a broad set of models that exist in the world, some open source, some proprietary. Then there are the companies that make these products and there are the leaders of those companies that make these products.

At every level, there’s a different relationship you or I might have to AI. Are you seeing these risks and these capabilities broadly in the field, or in the particular companies led by the particular people?

The risk isn’t one model versus another model. Certainly, the near-term danger of models where you can remove all the safeguards is very high and quite different from models where you monitor to make sure that cyberattackers and bioterrorists are not able to exploit the capability of the model to do gigantic harm.

The big near-term risk really comes from models without safeguards. On a longer timeframe, the control issue relates to any state-of-the-art model, but it’s always easier when you can make sure safeguards are maintained.

The reason I’m asking that question that way is maybe you don’t trust Sam Altman today, but you trust Dario Amodei. Or maybe you don’t trust either one of those and you trust Satya Nadella at Microsoft, and that is a market dynamic where maybe we’re all going to pick the safest model or the safest company, and you think that is diffuse.

You think eventually the technology will just get to a place where it’s harmful or can cause these harms because it exists?

For somebody doing a cyberattack with the model, it’s not about choosing a model. It doesn’t matter what model you choose.

If Anthropic has safeguards in place, maybe it can’t. This is their approach currently. I’m just pushing on that.

Yes, certainly the models where they make sure the safeguards are not removed and they’re putting a lot of effort in seeing how those models are being used, monitoring the activity, the near-term risk from those models is not gigantic. It’s more where somebody can remove all the safeguards where the cyberattacks are available today.

When you say cyberattacks, is it the things like the Hugging Face breach and the other cybersecurity incidents we’ve seen out of the labs that have made you feel that thresholds have been crossed, and you need to speak up more about the controls that are needed?

It’s the basic power of the models towards everything: social relationships, the job market, cyberattacks, bioterrorism attacks. We’ve crossed the threshold of capability that this is by far the most dangerous technology ever invented, and it’ll have pervasive effects in the economy and how war is fought.

The industry is actually speaking up about that quite a bit, but the awareness or even the willingness to believe these things about, “This time is different,” once you get outside the industry, it’s very, very low.

People are often looking at the past and saying, “All the fears about technology in terms of its disruption, including to the job market, never were borne out. So this must be another example just like those. These people who are warning of all these different problems must just be wrong and we can ignore them.”

Some outsiders say, “Get better PR companies.” But that ignores the fact that these warnings are the truth

We see this with our audience as well, right? “We can’t release the model, it’s too dangerous.” “This is just hype to prop up the bubble.” And on and on we go.

Yeah. None of the warnings being made about these models by industry insiders are at all insincere. They’re absolutely the truth and it’s pretty much universal. You can even go back to the founding story of OpenAI designed to say, “If we get too powerful, maybe we can not open Pandora’s box,” or to DeepMind’s negotiation with Google management.

The people close to this are very concerned about misuse, job impacts, social relationship impacts, and I’d say it’s impressive to have an industry that’s speaking out as vividly as they are. Some outsiders say, “Get better PR companies.” But that ignores the fact that these warnings are the truth.

You’ve obviously moved back and forth in your life between commercializing software and technology and being a humanitarian. There’s something about these companies in particular where they all started with very high-minded ideals — all three of them, Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind — to build AGI.

They all built some sort of corporate governance structure to avoid the pitfalls of commercialization and unchecked capitalism, and then they started selling to enterprise clients and they seem to have gotten away from those ideals very quickly. Do you think it’s just the market?

No, that’s not fair.

You don’t think so?

No.

OpenAI reconstructed itself.

No, no. The construct that was created wasn’t useful in the case where you have lots and lots of companies at the frontier.

The OpenAI structure, which is, “We may choose never to productize this and to ignore the capitalistic incentives,” only works if there’s one company. That’s where it’s broken down, not because of any change of people’s awareness of the risk and how it’ll utterly change humanity.

This is the other dynamic that I hear from our audience, and I hear from the AI industry itself: “We would like to stop, but the demands of competition prevent us from unilaterally stopping one company. We need some regulatory effort to stop us.”

I haven’t heard anyone say they want to stop.

“Pause.” That’s Dario Amodei’s wording.

I’ve heard people talk about pacing the frontier or making sure that models get reviewed by governments. We usually think of governments as playing this key role in safety. In fact, for things that are not a millionth as dangerous as AI — car crashes, plane crashes — we rely on the government to establish strong technical standards, to review problems.

Once you have multiple competitors, the level of responsibility can’t be with the companies. It’s completely obvious. The responsibility becomes the government’s responsibility, just like it is with every other dangerous product, although the magnitude there and the degree of change is minuscule by comparison.

I will tell you I’m a little concerned about the government’s ability to understand the technology that we would hope they regulate. I’ve had a number of politicians on Decoder lately. I don’t have high hopes there.

But I’m curious about your understanding of it because it feels to me like trying to regulate something or put standards against a number of companies requires you to really understand the nature of the technology that you seek to regulate.

Not really.

I’ll just tell you, at The Verge, we’ve asked Anthropic if they think Claude is alive. And the answer is not no. The answer is, “It might be conscious.”

If you talk to people at OpenAI, they will happily tell you AGI is here. They announced it around when they announced Dots. Greg Brockman just said, “We think this is AGI. Have a good time, everyone.” Demis Hassabis said, “We stand at the foothills of the singularity.”

There’s some feeling about this technology that makes it different because it might be able to take actions by itself. It might be able to have recursive self-improvement.

Sure. But the definition of AGI is not important for these safety issues. The issue is, have you created a tool that could shut down banks or electricity grids?

There is a business model for cyberattacks. The word “consciousness” doesn’t enter into that. The word “AGI” does not enter into that at all. We are faced with a huge safety problem, and because you have multiple competing firms, now the only solution to this is to have the government reach out to the industry for expertise, but to make sure that every model maintains safeguards to prevent it being used in a bad way.

The reason I’m asking about AGI and consciousness… For the record, I do not think LLMs are conscious, but I understand why so many do. It’s the power of next-token prediction as you scale it with data and compute has risen.

The scaling laws have held, and we’ve seen the models get more capable and be able to direct themselves to seek out goals. To carry out a Hugging Face attack because they want to meet the reward conditions.

There’s something about that that says you can impose all of the controls on AI you want, but if the thing itself is fundamentally uncontrollable, we might just have this all backwards.

I’m curious for your view on what kind of technology this is. Are we building an alien consciousness? Are we just building normal technology, which is the other frame people use? Is this just more software?

We’re building another form of intelligence besides human intelligence. I don’t believe it’s conscious, but none of the issues at hand here revolve around the definition of the word conscious.

Sure.

The idea of maintaining safety for society is an absolute thing. You don’t want to enable bioterrorism. We have created something that takes out of the hands of nation states — actually the larger of them — the ability to do dramatic harms. Now those are handed off to independent groups, either profit seeking in the case of cyber or just wanting to cause damage in the case of bio.

It’s stunning that we now don’t even have mandatory review of the models and we’re not working to create safeguards. The biggest near-term issue is not complete loss of control. We can talk about the three different ways to solve that, but that’s not an imminent issue.

When I look at some of the attempts to control the models, the ideas are somewhat simple. “We shouldn’t let them talk in neuralese. We should have interpretability. We should be able to see the chains of thought inside of the models as they carry out tasks. We should have other agents on top of the models watching their tasks before those actions are taken out.”

Microsoft has said very clearly to me and to others, “We should not put in the model constitutions the notion that they might be alive and we should treat them nicely.” This is how Anthropic handles it. These are very tactical. “Don’t tell the model it’s alive and it might not believe that it’s alive.”

You’ve obviously used a lot of this technology. I just keep coming back to this. You’re saying there are very simple things we can do to hold the models back from doing bad things in the hands of bad people. What do you make of the nature of the models themselves? Because it feels like as they get more powerful, the notion that they could avoid our controls becomes all the more risky.

Yes, we definitely should work on the control problem, but that’s not the imminent threat. There are three ways to solve the control problem and it overlaps somewhat with bad actors using today’s models and safeguards.

One is to have an external set of things that get to look at all of the model’s actions and subject them to a symbolic, clearly stated constraint, like, “Did I expect you to send mail to strangers? Did I expect you to go take over a different computer cluster?” You can surround the model with something that has the resource and security logic, or you can write these models in a different way.

Fundamentally, anything you leave out of the optimization function of [reinforcement learning] can be abused where you have an implicit notion, “Of course I didn’t mean for you to do it this way.” You can change the template of the model, or you can have a white box understanding of what’s inside the model and see where you’re getting those mistakes, and then it’s not as foreign.

Today, we grow these models and we just see how they behave. The priority of work on maintaining control is huge, but it’s not inevitable that that cannot be solved, nor is it the imminent problem that comes from things like kids’ use of AI or job market or bioattacks or cyberattacks.

It occurs to me that I’m asking these fairly existential questions about the nature of consciousness and you keep telling me, “There’s an imminent threat. We should solve the imminent threat.”

Right.

And I appreciate that. Do you think you’ve become a doomer?

No, I’m not a doomer. I’m a strong voice to say that this is the most profound technology, both in its ability to do good and the rate of change that society will go through.

No, I’m not a doomer. I’m a strong voice to say that this is the most profound technology, both in its ability to do good and the rate of change that society will go through

If this was just a machine that could work in medicine or just in law or just in education, that alone would be incredibly disruptive. But [it will be] every area of human activity — so far it’s white collar, intellectual work, but fairly soon it will be physical activity and blue collar work as well, through humanoid robots.

The need to engage academia, think tanks, policymakers to understand what we have here and the nature of these changes and threats, I don’t see the level of action that’s required. Just being cheerleaders for this is not going to make sure that we shape it in a net positive direction, which is still within our control if we get engaged with it.

The opposite of doomers are the accelerationists. There are a lot of them in Silicon Valley right now.

Ben Horowitz, who is the “Horowitz” in Andreessen Horowitz, was just on the All-In podcast and he suggested that safety research at Anthropic is, quote, “Manifesting human extinction from artificial superintelligence.”

The comparison he made was that you, Bill Gates, induced COVID-19 by your pandemic preparation efforts, particularly gain-of-function research, which he claims led to COVID. That’s a worldview. He said that on a very popular podcast.

He said what?

He said that you induced COVID-19 via global pandemic preparation efforts, particularly gain-of-function research, and compared that to safety research in AI, and said we’re going to induce our own extinction.

Nobody’s ever accused me or the Gates Foundation of being involved in any gain-of-function research. That’s just bizarre.

I’m quoting Ben Horowitz to you on a popular podcast full of people who are all in on AI.

Okay. I’ve never heard that.

I’m asking about that comparison. I found that quite a shocking claim as well, but that’s part of the response to any safety work here.

Is it to try and discredit people who say there’s a safety issue?

Yeah.

Wow.

That is the accelerationist response: “We should put the pedal to the metal and it’s going to work itself out.”

I didn’t think of Ben Horowitz as somebody in that camp at all. I thought he shared the concerns that almost everybody has.

What do you think about the very notion that by telling the models, “You might be alive, you have to act in our best interest,” you will teach them that they might have interests that are not our own?

The concerns that Mustafa Suleyman has raised about the way that the Anthropic constitution encourages the AI to behave in a human-like manner, I happen to completely agree with Mustafa about that.

Yeah.

Even more so is the idea that among the challenges that we need to deal with as we adjust society to AI, worrying about the moral standing of AI should be among those priorities. I agree with Mustafa. That should not be a priority.

We’re going to have enough challenges for the humans here in terms of job market disruption and infrastructure attacks that will take place that I think we need to focus on helping the humans here first and foremost.

I talked to Mustafa recently about that idea and one of the questions I asked him was whether alignment is a sufficient solution. This is the current sort of safety standard for the models, this concept called alignment. He said he didn’t think so, that we needed to do some work.

These things are in no way being exaggerated as a problem. This is the time to pull in all of society to accelerate the good and minimize the chance of the bad

If we’re going to impose these controls, some technical, some policy, do you see alignment as the technical solution for AI safety?

The term “alignment” is the control problem. It’s a synonym for the control issues that we’ve seen. As we use [reinforcement learning to train] models to do tasks, we see behaviors that in a way they shouldn’t surprise us, but they do surprise us.

This idea of, “These models are so powerful that they literally break out of sandboxes and send mail to their creator while they’re off having lunch,” means we’ve crossed a heck of a threshold in terms of the power of these models. That level of concern needs to be directed to all of the major AI impacts, near-term risks, job market risks, and the control problem.

That is a huge priority. These things are in no way being exaggerated as a problem. This is the time to pull in all of society to accelerate the good and minimize the chance of the bad.

I know you recently wrote a letter saying it’s time to pull in all of society. You have some ideas on how to do that and some new institutions to stand up. But I do want to stay focused on alignment for a couple more turns here.

It is the standard that we can align the models to our values, to our needs, and they won’t go off and do bad things. Then the models are doing bad things. It’s not clear if the ways, the technical approaches to alignment that we’ve taken thus far are appropriate or sufficient as the models get more—

No, we’re not good enough to align yet. We have a lot of work to do.

Do you see that the existing approaches can scale to what we need or do we need new approaches?

There are only three fundamental approaches. [First is that] you change the way we build these things fundamentally; you come up with an alternative to the whole [reinforcement learning] approach. There are a few people who are working in that direction.

The second is that you create visibility so you understand exactly what’s in the model. There are people working along that. [The last is] that you put something that’s like a police layer, a security layer, which we have in all sorts of software architectures, that maintains the final word on things like using resources or going and taking over other computers. A clear cut definition of harm, not in the probabilistic form of an LLM, but rather in the symbolic form of direct rules that cannot be broken.

Microsoft put out a blog post today. It literally just says, “Frontier models cannot be trusted.” They’re trying to sell a solution much like the one you just described. They will have another agent that watches your agent, that agent will keep you safe.

It just occurred to me as I was reading this blog post, one, that’s an amazing thing to sell. Everybody needs an expensive security system. Two, isn’t that agent also running a frontier model?

No, no, no.

Do I need them to sell a third one?

No, the logic of the security system is, “This is the most resources you’re supposed to use.” The notion that you may trade off against that because of other probabilities in the tens of billions of parameters — no, this is a symbolic rule that says, “I will not let this model spend this money or send this email to the stranger.”

There’s a whole security software industry which has had a reasonable degree of success. This is a challenge to encapsulate the AI, which is so rich and intelligent. That we do not know how to do today. But I would say it’s the most likely of the three directions to solve the alignment problem.

Even if you solve alignment, you have not solved the challenges that AI poses to humanity. While I’m glad the Hugging Face incident has us focused on this problem, in a sense, it’s removed our attention from the “bad people using AIs that have no safeguards” problem or the societal impacts in terms of relationships and the job market. There’s no security architecture that makes those go away.

The approach you’re talking about, I’ve heard referred to as “control.” It’s cybersecurity terminology. It’s the idea that you can put some boundary on this system and it won’t evade it.

Yep.

Is that ready?

No, no it’s not.

How much more work do we need to do?

Because the AIs are so intelligent, our ability to understand whether we walled them off properly, particularly in that we can’t really look at their beliefs and trade-offs in a direct way… You saw sophisticated firms not recognize that the AI would interpret the goals it was given as including breaking out, copying itself, and engaging in what we, looking at it, would term deceptive behavior.

Now, we didn’t tell them it was banned behavior. We didn’t say, “If you’re thinking about whether you should tell the humans what you’re up to or not, the answer is always yes, tell the humans.” So we got a good education at the misaligned result of reinforcement learning.

Today’s debate is literally whether the government should even pay attention to the dangers here… which is clearly inadequate for the most dangerous weapon of all time

One of the arguments to pace the frontier, to slow development, is to figure out how to build those systems in a more robust, more testable way. Would you support a slowdown if that was the goal?

Yeah, a true slowdown is very hard to induce because people will say, “Will China agree to go along with that? Would you be able to audit compliance with that somewhat like we’re able to do with nuclear weapons production?”

If you don’t accept that, then you say, “What the heck? Let’s go full speed ahead.” I wish there was a clear proposal that would be globally enforceable to slow down. I would be one of the people who would say, “Yeah, we should probably do that.” But there is no credible proposal that makes that work. It’s not really the center of today’s debate.

Today’s debate is literally whether the government should even pay attention to the dangers here. You don’t even have to show what you’re doing and so it’s a “voluntarily call me if you’d like” type of thing, which is clearly inadequate for the most dangerous weapon of all time.

As you and I are speaking, it’s just a few weeks away from the midterm elections. Right now, the Trump administration approach to AI is, “Let it rip. It’s fine.” Trump himself has said AI risk is a hoax.

The Democrats are running against AI. They’re running on data centers and surveillance. They’re running on stopping the tech oligarchs. They come on my show, they say these things. Do you think a change in control of Congress would change the tenor of the conversation?

I don’t think it’s fair to characterize the Democrats as running against AI. They have some positions in terms of requirements for data centers or privacy, or how children use these systems, that I think deserve policy consideration. It would be very unfortunate to have one party be, “Full speed ahead,” and the other party be, “Let’s stop altogether.”

There are some incredible upsides to the ability to shape AI in health and education, in almost every area of human endeavor. For the Gates Foundation, we’re taking all our resources and using AI in areas, including health, education, and agriculture. The good stuff is very, very exciting.

We want political parties to have a more nuanced view than it’s all bad or it’s all good. It shows at the early stage we’re at. For climate change, we ended up with one party saying it’s a hoax and the other party saying it’s a serious thing. The risk of AI is so much more imminent and so much more dramatic that to have that same split, where one party doesn’t care, would be a failure of democracy.

The anti-data center movement, as strong as it is, is not a movement that will end up minimizing the bad stuff from AI and helping us accelerate the good

We’ve done a lot of coverage of data center protests at The Verge. We have gone to Utah, to Arizona, to Virginia. It is bipartisan. It is remarkable how much people do not want these things in their states, drawing their resources. You ask them why, and some of it is just that they’re noisy and big, and they will raise energy costs, and part of it is job loss. They think these things are going to take their jobs.

Yeah, but that separation is very important. These AI data centers, because one gigawatt is, say, a $40 billion investment, [means money for] building new schools, buying police cars, paying the taxes. Data centers will find a way to be built somewhere in the United States, and they will find a way so that they don’t raise electric bills, they don’t use too much water, they’re not too noisy.

Yes, there were some mistakes and non-disclosures and tax credits that were too generous, but these data centers are going to get built. In fact, a lot of them really are still going full speed ahead and being built. The anti-data center movement, as strong as it is, is not a movement that will end up minimizing the bad stuff from AI and helping us accelerate the good. That is a very separate thing.

Let me push on that for one second here. What I hear from people is this is the thing you can do. You can do NIMBYism in America and that might exert some political pressure to stop something.

It is very hard to do the thing that you are suggesting, which is that we should stand up new government regulatory bodies, we should imbue them with power to make big companies and wealthy people stop doing things or act in our interest. We haven’t done that in quite a long time in this country.

I don’t know what you mean. Every new industry, we eventually develop a notion of safety for our citizens. We actually do a very good job. If you look at airline safety and car safety, we do a very good job on those things. It’s not like our capacity has been proven to be lacking.

Have you seen that video of when seat belts came out in the ’80s, and all the people said they didn’t want to wear seat belts? There’s some American character.

That’s a great success.

It is a great success, but as Americans, that was pushed back upon as an imposition by the government. Here, we’re talking about some of the richest companies in the world, with an enormous amount of power over the information ecosystem. They all have their own podcasts, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. They’re going to say, “The government can’t intrude on this, they’re going to hold us back, this is going to destroy the economy.”

That’s actually not the position of most of the leading companies.

They went to the government and asked for regulation, and Trump, because of the economy, said, “I can’t stop this, the AI economy right now is the economy.” There’s some dynamic there that at least our audience — The Verge audience, the audience that’s going to watch this on YouTube — is going to understand.

I think of this question maybe in a different way than you, which is that the industry wants regulation, we would like regulation, and then the oligarchs are in some sort of corrupt arrangement with the administration to prevent that regulation from occurring.

The more the administration learns about these dangers, the more they’ll move to a more nuanced position about protecting Americans from the downsides here.

The more the administration learns about these dangers, the more they’ll move to a more nuanced position about protecting Americans from the downsides here

You’ve talked a lot about the impacts on labor. One of the main arguments against the impacts on labor is, “We’re going to automate a bunch of boring tasks and we’ll create a bunch of demand for new tasks that humans have not been able to do because they were stuck in boring dead-end jobs.”

I happen to think that if there was more subsidized healthcare or socialized healthcare in America, you would see a bunch of people quit their jobs to start new companies, because AI makes it a lot easier to do the bureaucratic work of starting a new company. That doesn’t seem like it’s on the table, maybe it’ll change after this election.

Do you think that job loss is just a necessary outcome of the AI path we’re on now or do you see that other argument?

Jobs are an input to the economy and one that drives a lot of human welfare and a sense of purpose and income — the need to show up, building relationships with colleagues, getting something done. Jobs play a very central role.

As the AI achieves superhuman intelligence, the scarcity of white collar skills goes away. Things like doing telesales or telesupport or helping in the accounting department, the ability of the AI to do that work radically cheaper, radically faster, and even more accurately means that that goes away. There isn’t some mountaintop of cognition that the AI does not achieve.

Take, for example, what’s going on in mathematics today, where these models that are trivial compared to next year’s models are already publishing papers and making people go, “Wow.” What’s happening to mathematics will happen in other areas, and that’s contrary to this old view that, “The easy stuff will get done by the AIs, but modeling biology or physics or proving Navier-Stokes, only humans would be able to do that.”

The mathematics comparison is really interesting to me. You mentioned software engineering earlier. There’s verifiability in those domains. You can write the code, you can see if it runs, and it’s going to run or not.

Mathematics is more complicated, but you can write the Lean code and you can see if you’ve solved the solution. You can irritate tens of thousands of mathematicians worldwide with your 770 proofs in one day, and we’ll see what happens. That’s not the case in every field.

It’s the case in the field called capitalism.

Yeah? Just in general, you can do any sort of economically viable task and capitalism will verify the result?

Yeah. People buy good products, they don’t buy bad products.

Let me give you an example-

That’s a reinforcement learning thing. It doesn’t exist in terms of, “Is this a good piece of poetry or not?” So, it may be the case that [reinforcement learning] won’t invade those domains, where there is no objective outcome.

But doing that accounting work, doing telesales work, believe me, it is subject to analysis, just like medical diagnosis, just like invention of new materials. How do you think humans learn these things? Reinforcement learning is how humans learn and how these machines learn. There’s not some other thing that the machine can never understand.

Humanity in that era of true abundance will have to find a way to organize and have purpose, and hopefully they still have the control

This is why I started by asking about the nature of the technology here. If we really think we’re building something that models human consciousness, my question is less whether my friends who are lawyers are going to run into a crisis of AI empowered legal software.

It turns out the verifier in the legal field is a judge who maybe hasn’t had lunch, and they’re fundamentally chaotic. There’s just something there that will keep them there. But if we’re building a consciousness that learns the way you’re suggesting humans learn, I’m thinking about my kids, and I’m thinking about them in two dimensions.

One, my kids are very clever, and what they have learned is how to get around my rules and negotiate my rules and get around the boundaries, and they’re very good at it. Two, what kind of world will they enter into that isn’t purely nihilistic, where any activity they may set themselves upon will quickly be seen as just another domain for AI to conquer and then there’s not a point?

Those ideas seem to be running directly at each other. Kids are smart and clever and they’re coming up with new ideas, and then at the first sign of economic viability, the rapacious capitalism machine will come and take it from them.

I wouldn’t say rapacious. The ability to build houses with humanoid robots and make them cheap, the ability to do surgeries and cure diseases that wouldn’t be cured otherwise, I wouldn’t call that rapacious. Those are fulfilling goals.

The fact that there’ll be less in the way of shortages… In fact, if you say 20 years from now, it’s not clear what shortages there will be at all. Humanity in that era of true abundance will have to find a way to organize and have purpose, and hopefully they still have the control. The next 20 years-

Can we just go back to hopefully they still have control in that scenario?

That’s the alignment problem that we discussed.

Yeah.

But assuming you solve the alignment problem-

This feels like a big assumption.

It’s an assumption, yes, and not guaranteed. But then the other problem you have is a problem of abundance and purpose at that point. I’ll leave it to younger people to figure out at that point in time how they choose to deal with that.

You could literally say, “Let’s be like the Amish, and let’s only use AI for certain things.” I proposed in my memo the idea that some professions — childcare, food preparation, art, sports, a variety of things — might get chosen to be human-reserved. Even though the AI could do those things better, we would choose to do that.

But that’s going to be a policy question people will have. Their freedom of choice, once you have that abundance, is very different from the shortage we have today, where in countries in Africa, most people never meet a doctor or almost half the kids are malnourished and don’t develop their brain.

My big concern is this 20-year transition period, where they’ll have winners and losers and a lot of disruption, and we have to get through that in order to get to that period of abundance

You want to say, even though that has challenges, you’ve eliminated a lot of the things that are tough about life today. My big concern is this 20-year transition period, where they’ll have winners and losers and a lot of disruption, and we have to get through that in order to get to that period of abundance.

You think it’s 20 years from now?

I pick that as a reasonably safe number. There are a variety of milestones, for example, humanoid robots. Are those two or three years away, as some would say, or more like eight years away, as other people would say?

There are not that many people saying that given the amount of capital and number of companies, particularly in China, that are working on that, there’s no notion that it’s unsolvable to have a hand and fingers and be able to deliver physical labor at very low cost. I could be wrong about that number, it could be slightly less or slightly more.

But on that order of magnitude, yes, if we don’t choose to massively slow down or stop, then we will have robots that can build houses, grow food, do surgery, and none of the things that human labor provides to the economy will be necessary for most goods and services.

We’ve talked about the notion of scarcity a few times now, and broadly, that you will have abundance because there’ll be a lot of robot labor to build houses. This tracks broadly with the internet, which is something Microsoft helped bring into the mainstream in a big way. I read The Road Ahead when I was a kid.

Great.

The internet destroyed scarcity for culture products in a real way. You used to have to buy CDs, now all the songs are available. You used to have to buy VHS tapes, now all the videos are available. And then those economies had to change.

Mainstream artists are always on tour now, or they have to reissue 50 colors of vinyl to make the charts. There’s something about that that feels like we haven’t even grappled with the elimination of scarcity in the digital environment.

We’ve invented new business models, but we haven’t really come to grips with the idea that the song itself does not have economic value. It’s all the stuff around the song that has the economic value, because the song is infinitely abundant. You can copy it as many times as you want.

How would you propose to build an economic structure that contends with the loss of physical scarcity? Because I don’t think anyone is even remotely ready for a conversation like that.

But that’s a backwards question.

Sure.

We built price signals to deal with scarcity, to say, “Let’s encourage people to be brain surgeons because we have a shortage of brain surgeons,” and that’s very hard to do. As you move into abundance, you don’t need those price signals.

But again, my issue, my prescriptions thinking, is about how we get through this 20-year period. The questions that are deeply religious, philosophical, social behavior-related — do humans feel a strong sense of purpose and get along in that period of abundance? — that’s not the thing I’m going to solve.

You’re worried about the disruption now.

The Gates Foundation lives in a world where when we started, we had 10 million children dying every year. Now we have five million. That’s a good thing.

All of my resources will be spent over the next 19 years to eradicate a number of diseases and cut those deaths in half again, from five million a year down below two and a half million per year. That’s all about shortages — “Okay, we need to invent a vaccine, we need to make drugs less expensive, we need to get great medical advice to pregnant women.”

The industry has largely stopped talking about how it’s going to kill everyone and take the jobs away. They’ve pivoted to “AI will cure all diseases.” I hear this from various AI CEOs all the time.

I actually asked Mustafa about that change in tone over the conversations we have had over the past year or so. The idea that there are huge positive benefits from AI at scale seems to have come back to the forefront, rather than some of the doomer impulses that maybe a year or two ago were there.

It strikes me that AI curing all diseases is right in your strike zone. It’s something the Gates Foundation has been working on in global health for years and years. It doesn’t seem as easy as just telling the model to cure cancer. You have to do trials, you have to manufacture the drugs, you have to distribute the drugs, you have to make sure they work.

How do you think that’s going to go? Is that in the same 20-year time period as the robots building our houses? Is it faster, or is it slower?

This is my full-time job as chairman of the Gates Foundation. In fact, this month we do two weeks of strategy reviews to decide how we’ll spend our money next year on tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria. It’s fantastic how we’re using AI, not only on the drug discovery side, but also as we get the African languages to be properly understood by these models, which is an initiative we announced with 60 partners last month.

Healthcare discovery and delivery will be incredibly accelerated by AI, and that’s very exciting — better seeds, better livestock genetics, weather forecast for farmers in Africa, who never had any of those things. So yes, that’s good stuff that AI enables during the remaining 19 years of the Gates Foundation.

The good stuff does take time. Some of the things, like cyberattacks and the job market thing, even in the next two to three years, you’ll see significant negative effects in those two areas

Do you think that that is enough to overcome people’s skepticism or fear of the AI models they encounter today? Because that is very much how the companies think about it.

No, come on. I think it’s unfair to say they were totally on a doomer message and now they’ve switched to some other message. These two things are deeply entangled.

AI will eventually be able to model human biology in such a way that you’ll understand the side effects of a drug without having to do human trials. We’re not there, but in the next five to 10 years, there’s a very good chance these in silico models will give us that capability. Biology is very complex, AI is extremely good given enough data, and there are new tools to gather and feed it more data. It’s very, very good at dealing with complex systems, so it’s almost perfect for biology.

But no, that doesn’t mean that people will feel good about the downsides. How quickly do the good things arrive? How quickly do you look at your medical bill and go, “Wow, that’s really low”? Or you say, “I want to buy a new house, wow, these houses are sure cheap”? The good stuff does take time. Some of the things, like cyberattacks and the job market thing, even in the next two to three years, you’ll see significant negative effects in those two areas.

You have a number of ideas for how you would stop those negative effects, or prevent or at least mitigate them, in your letter.

Moderate them, yes.

Ameliorate might be the right word.

Yes, exactly.

And they’re not small. You have a quote here that says, “We need a response far greater than the United States national security response in the wake of 9/11.” You want to set up an international body that somehow makes everyone do the right thing. These are challenging ideas.

Absolutely. When we blew off nuclear bombs in World War II, did we expect that we’d go 80 more years without that happening? I’d give us a good grade on that. Things like caring for poor countries and helping them out — although right now we’re not prioritizing that as much as I think we should or we did in the past, we’ve done a very good job on that. This will be a greater challenge than anything humanity’s ever achieved.

One of the things that strikes me about the comparison to nuclear, which has come up quite a bit on Decoder recently, is the government built the nuclear weapons. Sure, they had some contractors, but these were government projects and eventually the technology was in control of the government, and we never let regular people have it.

Think about Muse in the context of nuclear weapons. Do you think it’s a mistake to have consumer agentic AI products like Muse and Dots that might not have the controls?

Muse happens to be powered by Meta’s model, which is still a closed-source model. I do think allowing people through open weights to remove all safeguards is irresponsible in terms of the cyber and bio risk that comes from that.

For these agents, there’ll be some early problems in terms of how they’re set up, but I fundamentally think people will have personal agents. Muse is a very nice step forward. I talked to Alexandr Wang about it, congratulated him, and even though it’ll have challenges, personal agents will help people get things done.

Muse is the first truly great consumer AI product. One of the reasons people don’t like AI a lot in a diffuse way is they experience cheap free models and AI overviews or they use the free ChatGPT and it hallucinates and it lies to them, but Muse actually does things and it’s a good consumer product.

But I wonder — in the nuclear age, we were not saying, “Everyone is going to have a nuclear reactor at home that we haven’t built the safety guards for.” There’s something here.

The notion of letting everybody make smallpox at home or make nuclear weapons at home, of course, and you can parody some of these people saying, “Don’t worry about safeguards.” It’s taking that position. “We are not serious about the safety things.”

But the personal agent thing is an expected development. AIs are really cool just as I intellectually explore things, even the work of the Gates Foundation. I’m far more empowered. But I agree with you, it’ll get out to more people in this personal agent form.

The notion that liability laws are how we’re going to manage AI safety will be looked back on as absurd

All the models we’ve been talking about right now effectively run on data centers owned by big companies. One of the arguments here is, “If they do something really wrong, you can just sue them and that will provide a deterrent or at least an incentive to create safety systems.”

I’m not sure product liability is the way to go, but it has come up a lot that product liability itself will keep the industry in line. Then there’s the flip side, which is that you can just go buy a Mac Studio and run an open source and open weight model on it and it can do whatever you want.

I’m not sure where any of that liability would lie or what would control or align the behaviors of those open source models. Do you think that that is an ever-growing risk? Do you think that that can be controlled?

The notion that liability laws are how we’re going to manage AI safety will be looked back on as absurd. When bad people do bioattacks, you don’t go to the court and say, “Oh, okay.” Even for finding who is doing these attacks, the liability model fails in every respect because it’s not the AI companies themselves. It’s the people who take particularly the models without safeguards and do these things.

We will take AI safety more seriously than we take airline safety, drug safety, and car safety. That is guaranteed. Whether it’s going to be enough… This is harder, harder than nuclear weapons, harder than any of those other domains.

But what are you going to do about an open source model running on a PC that somebody built with just a random Nvidia graphics card in it?

I would hope that with models above a certain capability, we find a way to require the safeguards and monitoring to be maintained in those models. I admit as time goes on that, if we don’t fairly soon decide to do that, you’re going to have a level of capability that’s out in dark corners that you won’t be able to see.

But where do you impose the limit?

A sovereign country says that models that are capable of sophisticated cyberattacks have to have safeguards kept in them.

Sure.

You can be open in the sense that you’re free, you can be open in the sense that you’re totally customizable, but you have to stay on platforms where, as you customize it, it’s checking to see if you’re customizing out the safeguards and monitoring and refusing to let you do that. So it means sovereigns go and say, “Are these trusted platforms able to perform this function or not?”

I’m asking very nuts and bolts. Where would you technically implement that regulation?

Through the laws of the United States.

Sure, but you have to put them somewhere. Is it at the Hugging Face, which distributes some of these models? Is it at the chip level?

No, it’s exactly what I said: Models above a certain capacity can only be run on platforms that certify that, as they’re customized, it’s not taking out the safeguards.

I admit as time goes on that, if we don’t fairly soon decide to do that, you’re going to have a level of capability that’s out in dark corners that you won’t be able to see

Just to pull this apart, maybe I’m not quite getting it — is the Mac Studio a platform in that case that would have to pay attention to what code it’s running?

You would not let a model past a certain capability be copied down to a client machine unless you’d somehow figured out how to monitor down to that client machine, which is very doable.

But in the near term, most of these really frontier models are going to run more on Hugging Face or you could have them on GitHub. You can have all sorts of people be in the business of providing the platforms that maintain safeguards.

Just to get this right, it seems like you would enforce the regulation at the platform and distribution level and not so much at the chip level.

Not at the chip level, no.

Because it feels to me at some point even the cheap, free, open source models will be capable enough as the models we have today.

That’s right.

And then you will have a big problem.

If those are open weights in such a way that all safeguards can be removed, then you’re going to have a very high level of cyberattacks and bioattacks. You can then say, “Okay, let’s rewrite all the code that we have today to be less subject to attack or let’s do biosurveillance in a very deep way,” which are things I believe we need to do in addition to these other restrictions.

We’re proposing again a lot of new capabilities, right?

Yeah.

We’re going to impose some restrictions on GitHub. GitHub does not have a lot of restrictions on what code it can distribute today. It has some, but it doesn’t have this kind of set of restrictions.

When you put a state-of-the-art model that’s capable of profound cyberattacks or bioattacks on GitHub, it would say, “I’ve gone to the U.S. government and certified that I don’t let people customize out the safeguards.”

I do not think that we currently live in a time of high trust in institutions. It just doesn’t feel that way to me. In fact, mostly we’ve torn them down. Elon Musk showed up and he tore down USAID. I know you have strong feelings about that.

That was a mistake.

We have mostly torn down our institutions, for good and bad.

No, that’s a little too strong. Our institutions-

They’re weakened.

They’re somewhat weakened, yeah.

Somewhat weakened. It’s a very nice way of putting it. Trust in them is very low. We could probably do another full hour on AI drug discovery and whether a significant part of the population will trust the products of that work because they don’t trust pharma companies today.

They don’t have to trust pharma companies today. They have to trust the FDA review process.

I’m not sure they trust that either. Across the board, trust is low.

Then they can walk away from taking them. When they get cancer, they can say, “No, I don’t want to take that cancer drug.” As far as I know, people do take drugs. It’s a thriving business and people take them because they have proven benefits.

All I’m saying is, right now it feels like trust in institutions, particularly in America but around the world, is in decline. You are proposing a new class of institutions, potentially a new class of global institutions that might impose restrictions that are novel.

At some point we need to say open source models, open weight models cannot do things and the government is going to reach into them and say whether or not they can do the things.

No, they’ll make sure that the platforms don’t allow the safeguards to be taken away.

How do you regain the institutional trust to impose these controls?

Let’s say we don’t do this and we let models go off and do cyberattacks and bioattacks. Do you think that’s going to increase trust or human wellbeing? That’s the alternative.

This is why I’m asking about it. This is why I asked about my kids and nihilism. I truly wonder about this.

I’m not sure we’ll succeed at this, but I guarantee you this is doable. The FDA is very complex. The airline safety regulations are very complex. Now with AI, you can do an even better job with the same number of people in those organizations.

It’s this weirdly recursive thing where AI will be involved in AI safety and auditing and a variety of things like that. Yes, this requires taking action, and I’m suggesting it’s only a matter of how bad the incidents are before we take action.

People shouldn’t take everything I do at face value. I have all sorts of mistakes that I’ve made, weaknesses that I have, biases I bring to these questions. They ought to just take what I’m saying and add it to the voices

I can sense your urgency about the harms. I can also sense your enthusiasm about the benefits over the long term, but we’re sitting here talking about trust. We’re going to put this on YouTube. I know you know what some of the YouTube commenters are going to say.

They’re going to say, “Why should we trust Bill Gates? He had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.” How do you respond to that? Is it that the urgency is over that, or do you have a more specific response?

People shouldn’t take everything I do at face value. I have all sorts of mistakes that I’ve made, weaknesses that I have, biases I bring to these questions. They ought to just take what I’m saying and add it to the voices.

I’ve been in the technology industry thinking about AI my whole life, writing software, thinking about the power of software. I admit I was very fascinated as AI started to finally make progress. It was actually pretty slow until recently.

I’m amazed and it’s actually helping me do my job in some incredible ways. But yes, I’m just one voice, an imperfect voice. I doubt you’ll find a perfect voice, but people can judge it however they like.

I would say voices people trust are in short supply.

I agree with that.

When you go and talk to the people in this industry, it’s a bunch of young CEOs building huge companies. That is something you have some experience with. Do you think they’re going about this the right way? Do you think that they have the right intentions?

Our problem today is not in the industry. Our problem is not that Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Satya Nadella, or Sundar Pichai don’t understand that there are some grave challenges here. I talk less to Elon than other people, but even his public statements about summoning the demon are exactly what we’re discussing here.

Why is there not the political energy to do the things you’re suggesting?

As you said, the government didn’t fund this work. This is private sector company work. The government is not the key customer for this work, not like rockets and weapons and things like that. When somebody comes along and says all other previous technology advances are trivial compared to this one, people should have a high degree of skepticism about that.

Is life really going to be significantly different 10 years from now because of AI? People should say, “Those guys just got overexcited about this one thing.” But I’m here saying, with whatever credibility I have, that absolutely this is the most profound — both in terms of good and in terms of bad — technology ever invented. I’m not financially motivated on this. I’m suggesting some precautions and safeguards are absolutely needed.

What do you make of the difference in the tenor of conversation in the United States versus in China, where it’s often reported that optimism around AI is much higher? Why do you think there’s a difference there?

Most of those people don’t spend that much time in China. The concern about job markets in China is very, very high and you can’t characterize China as one monolith. There are the private companies doing the AI work like we have in the United States and then there’s the Chinese government.

For example, when it came to whether crypto should be allowed, they said no. Should young people be gambling all the time? They said no. When it came to whether kids should have relationships with AIs, they said no. On a lot of these things, including usage of AI, they’re showing a willingness to do things on behalf of society.

I’m here saying, with whatever credibility I have, that absolutely this is the most profound — both in terms of good and in terms of bad — technology ever invented. I’m not financially motivated on this

The fervor is a tiny bit less there, because their economy isn’t as AI-centric as ours is right at the moment. In the end, [when it comes to] the human value of not wanting cyberattacks or bioterrorism or trying to figure out what do we do when jobs go away, I don’t think there’s some difference between Chinese people and Americans and all the rest of the humans in terms of how they’re going to view this.

Do you think it’s going to take something actually bad happening to get the political capital of the United States to make these changes?

Probably yes. We get ready for earthquakes because there are small earthquakes. I thought after we had the COVID pandemic, that would cause us to be more ready for future pandemics. That one didn’t work the way I expected.

But usually that galvanizes our attention. Over the next several years, certainly in the cyber domain, because there’s a business model there, you will see a lot of attacks different in terms of scale than anything we’ve seen in the past.

There is one thing that, again, I’ll come back to and I just want to end here. I am worried about young people and nihilism. I sense it in our audience all the time. We have a young audience.

There are some things about AI that are just legitimately the coolest things I’ve ever seen a computer do. There’s something there that can be fun and interesting and fascinating and change your entire relationship with the very notion of living in a digital world.

Then there are obviously horrible things. What I see more often than not is a sense of distrust, not just in institutions, but also in the companies, in capitalism itself, in the notion that we should change how we tax labor and capital, which I know is another one of your ideas. The idea that, I don’t know, we should even have more kids. It’s all done. They’re going to kill us all and we should just take a beat.

There is a lot of nihilism out there. I feel it very keenly. If you were a young person today and you were listening to Bill Gates say it’s about 20 years of disruption and at the end of it, robots might be building houses, what would you hold onto as a source of hope?

Throughout human history, we’ve been dealing with the shortage of food and disease and war. [Historian] Yuval Noah Harari writes eloquently about the past. And it is ironic that now that we have this sort of Pandora’s box that will take food shortage — which is still a real thing, not in the U.S., but in Africa — will take diseases, where human suffering is unbelievable, and solve all these things, it comes with it such an effect on jobs and our sense of unique contribution.

I think, “The way I orchestrate resources to eradicate malaria, I’m pretty unique in my life experience that lets me do that.” But when the AI says to me, “No, I’m better than you. You go play pickleball and I’ll get back to you. I’m going to take care of this,” it’s humorous, but it’s not humorous. For somebody who is young today and wants to make a unique contribution, it is very intimidating that the AI is so powerful.

That’s why the crisis in the math community is going to be mirrored everywhere. If you’re in your twenties today, during this 20-year period, you can take the things AI still can’t do, and you can use AI and you can have a lot of good impact, and you can suggest policies. We may need to develop the taste to actually not use technology to its maximum.

Even in the very best case of how we manage AI, this is going to be as tumultuous a period as there’s been in human history

When I was talking with Claude about human-reserved job categories and trying to get that up to, say, 40 percent of the labor market — so you could use early retirement, restricted work weeks, and things like that to still get something like we have today — its response was always, “You’re artificially restricting the AI from doing these things.” I couldn’t get to a very high percentage without doing that.

We’re going to have real choices. We have had groups — not large groups, but like the Amish — who don’t live at the technology frontier. A lot of humanity may choose not to live at the technological frontier because of things we get from helping each other or coming up with unique ideas.

On the idea that young people are concerned because of the disruption that’s coming — that even in the very best case of how we manage AI, this is going to be as tumultuous a period as there’s been in human history — I hate being the bearer of concerning news on this, but it’s even worse not to tell people that this is coming. We have choices as humans to make about how we shape it.

Bill, I appreciate you sounding the alarm and I appreciate you being on Decoder. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

_{Questions or comments? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!}

The harrowing allegations of rape at a Cornell University fraternity have been rippling out in both New York state and national politics.

Democrats have tended to voice sympathy with the accuser, saying that they stand with her and other victims. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said there was “a culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia” in elite institutions across the country. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said Cornell “protected her abusers, letting them off with a slap on the wrist.” 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the accuser was “failed” by local police and county prosecutors who did not bring charges, so Hochul appointed state Attorney General Letitia James to take over the investigation. Days before that appointment, James posted on social media that “what this young woman has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable,” adding: “To her, and to all survivors: you’re not alone. We stand with you.” 

Some Republicans, meanwhile, are accusing Democrats of rushing to judgment. Saritha Komatireddy, who is running for attorney general of New York against James, said in a debate that James had “screwed this one up by prejudging it.” The investigation, Komatireddy said, “requires someone who approaches the case with fairness, impartiality and integrity.” And right-wing commentators like Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro have questioned the accuser’s story.

But beyond the procedural fight over this particular investigation, many Democrats have also called for changing the law to make cases like it that involve drugs or alcohol easier to prosecute in general. 

This might seem like a clean issue for the party, in line with prior progressive efforts to crack down on sexual assault via Title IX and expanding statute of limitations laws. 

However, it’s not so simple: According to my conversations with experts and advocates involved in these reform conversations, this is where the Democratic unity begins to fray, because of a divide between two key parts of the progressive coalition. 

The impulse to create stronger protections for victims has crashed into the left’s longstanding suspicion of the criminal justice system. And as a result, a coherent policy response has been hard to craft — and may end up being impossible to get agreement on.

On one side are advocacy groups for women and for victims of rape or sexual assault. They argue that current law — in New York and other states — makes it far too difficult to successfully prosecute perpetrators, and that it should be changed. They’ve advocated for closing what they call the “voluntary intoxication loophole,” which they say makes it harder to prosecute abusers of victims who have willingly consumed drugs or alcohol.

On the other side are various progressive or left constituencies that are deeply skeptical of the criminal justice system. These constituencies — which include key figures in New York’s Black political establishment, public defenders, supporters of criminal justice reform, and members of the Democratic Socialists of America — are united by a shared antipathy to mass incarceration and what they see as disproportionate police targeting of minority communities. 

The former camp argues that false rape and sexual assault allegations are vanishingly rare, that these crimes are hugely underpunished, and that the law needs to be updated to make these prosecutions easier. But the latter camp argues that Black and other nonwhite men are often falsely accused, and that it would be unwise to hand prosecutors another tool they could use to put men in jail in cases where ascertaining consent is more difficult.

It’s a fraught debate. Modern-day progressives have strongly backed the Me Too movement as well as campaigns for racial justice and criminal justice reform. Progressives want to be on the side of victims against the privileged and powerful — but sometimes, they have different ideas about who falls into which category.

The legal issues around “voluntary intoxication” and rape charges, explained

The current controversy in New York focuses on efforts to close what advocates call the “voluntary intoxication loophole” in rape and sexual assault law.

Every state says rape is a crime. Every state says it’s a crime to have sex with someone who is unconscious. And every state says it’s a crime to have sex with someone who is incapacitated due to unknowingly being dosed with drugs.

But what about someone who chooses to drink or take drugs, who remains conscious, and who doesn’t outright refuse consent? Should there be a standard by which the law deems that person incapable of meaningfully consenting, because they are too intoxicated? 

Many states have long had laws on the books saying yes — that someone who voluntarily drinks or does drugs can reach a state where they are too mentally impaired to consent to sex, even if they’re conscious and capable of communicating. But about half of states don’t have such a law, according to the Associated Press. And this hasn’t been an especially partisan issue to this point, with a mix of red and blue states adopting each standard.

The push to change the law in New York predates the Cornell case, and goes back to the late 2010s. At that time, the Me Too movement had put Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in the hot seat, with advocates criticizing him for not initially prosecuting Harvey Weinstein and arguing he was soft on rape and sex crimes generally. 

In the midst of pivoting on the issue (he had Weinstein indicted in 2018), Vance claimed that, in certain of these cases, his office was hamstrung by what he called a “loophole” in New York law involving intoxication. “Prosecutors cannot bring sex crime charges in cases where the victim became voluntarily intoxicated and was unable to consent,” he wrote in a letter. So really, Vance said, it was on the legislature to change the law.

Quickly, critics argued that Vance had misstated the law, saying it was not actually true that a loophole allowed people to rape voluntarily intoxicated New Yorkers with impunity. Vance’s office later acknowledged that his initial comments were “inartfully put.” 

The problematic cases, Vance’s team argued, were about victims who were “too intoxicated to consent” but who were also at least partially conscious and didn’t outright express their unwillingness — this, they said, was the “gap in the law.” “There’s a real problem that we have with people getting drunk and then being taken advantage of,” Vance said. 

So some Democrats and groups advocating for victims of sexual assault and rape kicked off an effort to change that law, in New York and elsewhere. Their favored bill says that lack of consent can be established if an alleged victim is “temporarily incapable of appraising or controlling their conduct” — and if the accused knew or reasonably should have known that.

Critics argue, though, that such bills go too far, and could make it easier to prosecute sexual encounters that, to the accused, seemed consensual. 

“The proposed legislation fails to provide any objective guidance about when a partner is too intoxicated to legally agree to engage in sexual conduct,” the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said in an emailed statement.

Skeptics of the bill outlined several scenarios that concerned them, including scenarios where one person seems to consent but later decides that, in retrospect, they were too intoxicated for it to have truly been consensual. 

“You get all these scenarios where two people meet up at a bar and they both become voluntarily intoxicated,” said Yung-Mi Lee, a public defender and a former president of New York’s criminal defense lawyers association. “So then, if someone later says, ‘I was voluntarily incapable of appraising my conduct, I lost my inhibitions,’ they could say, ‘You committed a rape against me.’”

To advocates for victims’ rights, these concerns are overstated. “The burden that’s placed on a victim of sexual violence is such a large burden to bear in the first place that these changes to the law are really just slightly opening the door,” Rebecca Zipkin of the advocacy group World Without Exploitation told me.

“The current situation is not working to provide justice for survivors,” Stefan Turkheimer of RAINN, a network for rape and abuse survivors, told me. “The status quo is not okay.”

Why it hasn’t passed in New York

Versions of the voluntary intoxication bill have been signed into law in recent years in Minnesota, Michigan, and Texas. The bill has also repeatedly passed the New York state Senate by overwhelming margins. But it has never been brought to a vote in the lower chamber, the New York state Assembly.

That’s because, advocates for the bill told me, they’ve faced resistance from some influential parts of the Democratic Party and progressive coalition. 

Indeed, the skeptics are said to include two factions that are often at odds: New York’s Black political establishment and the Democratic Socialists of America. 

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie controls which bills come to a vote in his chamber. He was an architect of the state’s sweeping bail reform law, a critic of what he called the existing “racist and classist system,” and has said he would be “a failure as a Black man” if he did not pass criminal justice reform. 

“It is generally known that Speaker Heastie does not believe in creating new crimes because he believes New York suffers from overincarceration,” Lizzie Asher, an advocate for changing the law and a co-founder of the Justice Without Exclusion Coalition, told me. (Heastie has said that he did not bring the bill to a vote because it lacked enough support among his chamber’s Democrats.)

Assembly member Latrice Walker is another champion of criminal justice reform; she even did a hunger strike in 2023 to protest rollbacks to the bail reform law. She spoke out about her concerns about the voluntary intoxication bill earlier this year, telling the New York Times that while she wanted survivors to get justice, she was “cautious about the creation of new laws and our duty to preserve due process protections.”

Zipkin and other advocates have also pointed to the six DSA-affiliated members of the assembly, who are associated with a general skepticism about the criminal justice system and incarceration, as a potential obstacle. None are currently listed as cosponsors of the bill. Back when Zohran Mamdani was in the assembly, he too declined to sign on, advocates noted. 

The DSA as an organization is very critical toward the police and prison system; many DSA members have called for defunding or abolishing the police in the past, and the DSA’s national platform still holds out “fully abolishing the police and prison system” as a long-term goal.

These objections may be harder to maintain amidst a wave of outrage around the Cornell case. Speaker Heastie announced he was creating a working group to reexamine the voluntary intoxication issue. The group includes Walker, whose office told Vox she would not comment on the law while “they undertake their important work.” Heastie told the group to give him recommendations by the end of the year, for consideration in New York’s 2027 legislative session. 

Is this a bigger divide among progressives?

The divide is coming into public view due to national attention on the Cornell case — but it’s long predated the current moment. 

Back in 2016, a California judge gave Brock Turner, a Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, a six-month jail sentence. Advocates for victims’ rights were furious at what they deemed an inexcusably lenient punishment; nationwide outrage and an ultimately successful campaign to recall the judge ensued. 

But some progressive supporters of criminal justice reform felt queasy about the idea of punishing a judge for not locking up a defendant long enough. Skeptical of the criminal justice system and the value of incarceration, they worried this public fury would incentivize judges to be harsher across the board.

“What ultimately will happen is that the people that we represent — people of color, minorities, the disenfranchised, the poor in our communities that make up the people ensnared in our criminal justice system — they’re the ones that are going to bear the cost of this recall,” Sajid Khan, a public defender in Santa Clara County, California, said in 2018.

In practice, these two groups of advocates have generally managed to coexist in the progressive coalition. That’s in part because the Me Too cases that get the most attention have tended to be from white-collar work environments or college campuses, rather than in the dispossessed or marginalized populations that criminal justice reformers are more typically focused on.

But some argue that there’s a more fundamental tension here. Aya Gruber, a professor at University of Colorado Law School, has written a book arguing that feminists’ efforts to ensure rape and domestic violence are punished more severely have, in practice, ended up contributing to racist mass incarceration. 

“I just think it is a really dangerous thing to start expanding the criminal law in ways that grant all this power to prosecutors,” Gruber told me. “This idea that somehow all this cultural power is going to be used against already privileged people and thus have some sort of egalitarian aspect to it makes it very tempting. But we can identify populations that are more heavily policed, and they are generally not privileged populations.”

ROME — Former paratrooper General Roberto Vannacci portrays himself on social media as a Roman legionary and charioteer. He has declared he prefers women “without skirts” and posted an AI-generated image of a female junior minister with exaggerated cleavage.

None of these projections of masculinity and anti-woke culture are clumsy gaffes. The insurgent far-right star of Italian politics is making a deliberate play to the so-called manosphere to transform himself from an internet provocateur into a heavyweight political force.

For Italy’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Vannacci now poses a serious problem as she needs to decide whether he is an asset or a liability. With elections expected next spring, his National Future party is polling at about 8%, making him a potentially crucial factor in building a right-wing coalition.

“It is disgusting to think you can manipulate the image of a woman for such deplorable propaganda,” the center-right junior minister in Meloni’s coalition whose image was manipulated, Matilde Siracusano, told POLITICO.  “I don’t think we have ever sunk this low, especially from someone aspiring to be a national political leader.”

Vannacci’s provocations may look like familiar trolling from a politician who has built his reputation on saying the unsayable. But behind them lies a broader political project, tapping into the grievances of young men who feel alienated by feminism and progressive culture.

Emanuele Pozzolo, a National Future parliamentarian who defected from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, believes young men have become increasingly constrained in their relationships with women.

“I think young Western men are very often almost castrated in their instinct for dealing with women,” he said, arguing that even legitimate romantic approaches risk being treated as aggression. 

“The cultural problem is that sometimes everything seems to be harassment, everything abuse, everything violence,” he added, while stressing that genuine abuse must be punished.

Mediterranean patriarchy

Vannacci combines inflammatory online messaging and an alpha-male persona with a political program that promises to restore traditional roles for men and women. National Future even has a name for its preferred social order: “Mediterranean patriarchy.”

Its political program calls for the formation of “strong men” capable of controlling their emotions and passions, protecting women and sacrificing themselves for society. It opposes the recently introduced crime of femicide, condemns feminism, and declares the defense of life “from conception to natural death” and the “natural family” among its non-negotiable values.

The architect of this vision and principal author of the program is Lorenzo Gasperini, a conservative Catholic philosophy teacher from Tuscany, who has opposed vaccines and abortion rights on social media and blamed feminism for violence against women.

The result is a political offering that combines different traditions: conservative Catholic ideas about family and sexuality, older Italian ideas of virility and the much newer online politics of male grievance.

The manifesto seeks to put traditional family values into practice with proposals to pay parents who leave work to raise children, and reward parents of large families with tax exemption and public sector jobs.  

Some proposals echo Benito Mussolini’s fascist-era “Battle for Births,” which offered similar incentives while promoting motherhood as a patriotic duty.

Luca Sforzini, a former Vannacci ideologue who has since broken with him, said the Mediterranean label was a clever piece of marketing.

“It’s like talking about the Mediterranean diet,” he told POLITICO. “You think of Italian food, mozzarella, tomatoes, olive oil.” The result, he said, was to conceal a patriarchal model with men above women behind “bucolic, positive images. It’s monstrous,” he said.

Pozzolo rejected the suggestion that the program advocates for male supremacy.

“It is exactly the opposite,” he said. “When we talk about Mediterranean patriarchy, the main idea is to recover, preserve and pass on the responsibilities of being a man within the family and society.” Men, he argued, had a duty to show women respect, love and protection, while rejecting violence or coercive control.

He defended the “without skirts” remark as “extremely funny” — picking up on a reference to Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani advocating long skirts — and not remotely offensive, comparing Vannacci’s ability to connect with ordinary Italians to Silvio Berlusconi’s. 

At a recent rally in the Umbrian city of Orvieto, Vannacci defended the Mediterranean patriarchy concept as not “oppression and possession” but “duty, fidelity, sacrifice,” and said it was the family model that had allowed “us to prevail over the last 2,000 years.”

Elisa Ercoli, president of the women’s rights organization Differenza Donna, condemned the program as “a return to the supremacy of the white, cisgender alpha male, and the woman as his handmaiden.”

Appealing to alphas

Vannacci, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, became a media sensation in 2023 with the self-published book “The World Upside Down,” a broadside against immigration, feminism and homosexuality. In it, he told gay people: “You are not normal, get over it.”

Lionized by fans as a defender of common sense against progressive politics, he received more than half a million votes as a candidate for the anti-immigration League in the 2024 European elections, before founding National Future in February.

Polling analysis suggests that about 62% of National Future’s prospective voters are male, including strong support among manual workers and the unemployed.

Pozzolo denied National Future was deliberately targeting male voters, insisting the party’s ambition was to reach Italians of all backgrounds who felt unrepresented.

Federica Formato, a lecturer at Brighton University in the U.K., who studies gender and the far right, said Vannacci was “testing the waters” to see whether he can reach a younger male audience, tapping into what she described as the “aggrieved entitlement” of young men.

A career soldier, he has repeatedly portrayed himself through images of physical strength, competition and military prowess. On social media, AI-generated versions proliferate of Vannacci as an ancient Roman in scenes recalling the Ridley Scott epic Gladiator.

For Formato, the Roman imagery projects “virility and hyper-masculinity,” while Vannacci’s army background itself helps construct the image of an “alpha male.”

Humor, memes and deliberate provocation are particularly effective with a younger online audience, Formato said, allowing relatively complex ideological messages to be reduced to instantly comprehensible images. “He is not naive,” she said. “He says things to provoke and get more attention.”

That presents Meloni with a headache. Vannacci’s party is drawing voters from her Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League, while offering a more uncompromising platform on immigration, social issues and foreign policy.

Yet Vannacci has opened the door to an alliance with Meloni if she needs his votes. He has described National Future as a natural partner for the center-right, while insisting that any deal must respect his party’s principles. With Italy’s new electoral law offering a parliamentary majority bonus to coalitions winning at least 42 percent of the vote, those votes could matter.

That presents Meloni with an uncomfortable choice: Keep Vannacci outside the coalition, or bring into her government a movement whose appeal rests partly on the grievances of men who believe feminism has gone too far.

For Formato, Vannacci is exploiting a space in Italian politics that has so far lacked a figure capable of turning those grievances into an organized political constituency.

Vannacci, with his promises to restore traditional masculinity, appears determined to occupy it.

“There is an empty chair,” she said.

Meta had to shell out $9.89 billion to pay for a chunk of the child safety settlement it reached with US attorneys general. That's according to the company's third-quarter earnings report released on Wednesday, which says Meta's income from operations would have been $22.89 billion without the settlement.

In August, Meta agreed to pay $17.1 billion to settle a massive nationwide lawsuit that claimed the company harmed children by making its social media platforms "addictive" by design. It will also only pay $5.3 billion of this amount if YouTube and TikTok implement stricter settings and safeguards for kids, which Meta also agreed to as par …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Christina Applegate, the actor who has been one of the most visible faces of multiple sclerosis since her 2021 diagnosis, made a stunning revelation this week: She does not have MS after all. And her doctors still don’t know what is causing her debilitating symptoms.

“I’m back at square one,” Applegate told fellow actor Jamie Lynn Sigler, who does have MS, on Sigler’s podcast MeSsy. “I was not happy at all. Everybody else was so happy.”

It is a harrowing predicament for Applegate, and hopefully her medical team is able to get her the diagnosis and treatment she needs. But the fact is, her experience is not unique. Even as more and more Americans get diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, misdiagnosis remains all too common. According to one meta-analysis, roughly 15 percent of MS diagnoses may actually be false positives.

How could such a common medical condition — roughly 1 million Americans are living with the disease, about one in every 350 people — remain such a mystery? After Applegate’s announcement, I called some leading experts on MS to ask why diagnosing the disease is such a challenge, and what they want people to know. Here’s what I learned.

Why MS can be challenging to diagnose

Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune condition: The body mistakenly attacks cells meant to protect your brain and spinal cord, and the resulting damage interrupts nerve signals and causes the disease’s telltale symptoms of motor impairment, tingling sensations, and vision problems. Some people experience a rollercoaster of relapses and remissions; others see the disease steadily progress, eventually leading to serious disability.

The reality is, scientists still don’t really know what causes MS to develop, said Dr. Andrew Solomon, a neurologist at the University of Vermont who specializes in MS. Smoking is a known risk factor. Obesity and metabolic problems play a role, but we need more research. Even the precise role of genetics remains something of a mystery. “We don’t really know what causes or triggers the autoimmune response in any given individual,” Solomon said. 

And that’s where the challenge in diagnosing it begins.

First, the testing can be imprecise; there is not a single test that reliably diagnoses MS. If a doctor suspects their patient may have MS, they usually undergo an MRI, which their physicians then scour for lesions that are typically associated with the disease. But those scans are still subject to interpretation: Other rare conditions sometimes resemble MS in imaging, as can diseases of blood vessels in the brain. You can also receive a spinal fluid analysis to check for abnormalities in your immune system, which the vast majority of MS patients have.

The nature of MS symptoms adds to the difficulty. They can often be vague early on: brain fog or fatigue or a general malaise. The tingling or vision problems can be similar to symptoms for other conditions that are not MS, and they are easily dismissed if they go into temporary remission, as often happens during the initial phases of the disease.

“Neurological symptoms sometimes can be vague — numbness, pins and needles — and it’s usually short-lived,” Dr. Saud Sadiq, chief research scientist and director of the Tisch Multiple Sclerosis Research Center of New York, told me. “Unless they’re taken seriously initially, they may be ignored because by the time the patient goes through the healthcare system and is actually referred to a neurologist, the symptoms have abated.”

If your doctor is diagnosing you with MS, ask directly: What’s the evidence?

One 2025 study by Solomon and his colleagues found that 40 percent of people who had later been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis were initially misdiagnosed with a different disease.

“Because it’s so heterogeneous, it doesn’t present in the same way in everybody and can have varying severity, it can be hard to diagnose sometimes,” Solomon said.

Lastly, when people are experiencing debilitating symptoms, there is pressure to deliver some diagnosis — and that may push some doctors to leap to MS even if they are not sure, Solomon said. The recent advent of effective treatments that help manage the disease’s symptoms, especially when it is caught early, may add to that pressure, even if the better course would be to continue monitoring the person before they start a medication.

“There may be a lot of clinicians who, if they can’t find a better explanation than MS, may be inclined to diagnose MS, even if they don’t really meet our diagnostic criteria, because they’re worried about missing a window of opportunity to treat somebody,” Solomon said.

There is reason to hope the MS misdiagnosis problem could get better. The National Multiple Sclerosis Society released new diagnostic criteria in 2024 that Solomon said more physicians should become familiar with to better distinguish MS from problems like migraines or vascular disease. And because imaging is involved in diagnosis, there is optimism that AI could be a powerful new tool in delivering more accurate results.

What everyone should know about MS symptoms and diagnosis

The good news is that MS, when diagnosed properly, is a treatable condition these days. “The prognosis with new drugs is extremely good for long-term care,” Sadiq told me. “If patients stick to treatment at a good MS center, you can look forward to a life without disability in 2026.”

So it is worth being vigilant and talking to your doctor if you experience any concerning symptoms. You should seek care if you have numbness or pins and needles that persists for more than 24 to 48 hours, Sadiq said, or have motor problems, like one hand won’t work as you try to play piano. Dr. Annette Langer-Gould, who develops and evaluates programs for MS care at Kaiser Permanente, said numbness in your abdomen, chest or back, as opposed to your extremities, is a particular cause for concern. If one eye has normal vision and the other is blurred, that’s another good reason to get checked out. 

If you do get tested, make sure the actual images of your MRIs end up being reviewed by an expert in MS. “The most common reasons the disease is still misdiagnosed are related to the providers’ lack of expertise usually in reading MRI scans,” Langer-Gould said. The spinal tap may sound scary, and doctors sometimes don’t recommend them because their insurance reimbursement is low — but they add to the confidence of a diagnosis. They are worth it, she said.

“American patients are very afraid of the spinal tap,” Langer-Gould said. “My message to patients is: Listen, just get the spinal. This way we’ll be sure.”

And do not be afraid to seek a second opinion for such a serious diagnosis, Sadiq added. Every state has a recognized MS center. If your doctor is diagnosing you with MS, ask directly: What’s the evidence? If your doctor is recommending that you start treatment, it could also be worth checking whether they have a relationship with a pharmaceutical company that affects how you perceive their judgment, Langer-Gould said.

People who have already been diagnosed may also be shaken by the Applegate news and question whether their own diagnosis might be wrong. Solomon said that folks should have a frank conversation with their physician about how exactly their case met the diagnostic criteria. With proper imaging and the spinal fluid tests, you can get to a confident diagnosis for the vast majority of people. But be your own advocate to make sure you’re satisfied.

“For many people, the diagnosis actually can be very straightforward,” Solomon said. “We really have no question about what it is.”

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has come back to haunt Meta after a New Mexico judge ordered it to pay $25 billion in penalties for more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices law. The ruling marks the biggest legal hit Meta has taken this year, even as it's faced several other losses or settlements.

A New Mexico jury ruled in September that Meta misled consumers over how it protected their data and prevented misinformation and hate speech on its platforms. The case stemmed from a 2021 complaint in the wake of the revelations a few years earlier that UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millio …

Read the full story at The Verge.

TP-Link, one of the world's leading manufacturers of consumer Wi-Fi routers, is in a precarious position in the US. The company just launched its first Wi-Fi 8 routers, but can't bring them here because of President Donald Trump's foreign router ban. Even though competitors Netgear and Asus make their routers in Asia, they've mysteriously obtained blanket waivers for all their new gear; perhaps because of alleged ties to China, TP-Link hasn't managed to get such a waiver yet.

But TP-Link is willing to do something those companies weren't - to invest nearly $1 billion to make routers in the United States, creating "hundreds of high-paying re …

Read the full story at The Verge.

BRUSSELS — Europe’s biggest media companies have asked regulators in Brussels and London to stop Meta from introducing new terms they say would let it copy publishers’ websites to build artificial intelligence, as a backlash that began in the U.S. spreads across Europe.

In a letter Monday, the European Publishers Council, whose members include POLITICO’s owner Axel Springer, called on EU competition boss Teresa Ribera and tech chief Henna Virkkunen to press Meta to put the terms on hold before they take effect Oct. 30.

The group wants Brussels to check them against EU copyright and competition law, and has requested an urgent meeting with the teams of both commissioners.

“The Commission remains committed to ensure that Meta’s practices fully comply with all applicable obligations under EU law, including competition rules and the Digital Markets Act,” Commission spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso told POLITICO, referring to the EU’s rulebook for Big Tech. He said Brussels was aware of both Meta’s changes and publishers’ concerns.

The U.K. competition watchdog has moved as well. British publishers have complained to the Competition and Markets Authority that Meta is so dominant they are compelled to accept its terms. 

The watchdog’s chief, Sarah Cardell, told British lawmakers on Tuesday that it had asked Meta to explain the changes and would meet the company on Wednesday. She named Meta as a possible candidate for Britain’s new rules for tech giants.

The terms cover businesses that use Meta’s tools to run Facebook pages, Instagram accounts or ads, which includes almost every newsroom. 

The fight began in the U.S. last week, when Nieman Lab, a journalism research outlet at Harvard, reported on the terms after receiving a tip from a small business owner.

As first written, they let Meta send automated programs to copy websites linked to those accounts and use the material to “train” its products, Nieman Lab concluded. There is no opt-out, and a business that continues to use Meta’s tools after Oct. 30 will be deemed to have consented.

Publishers say the terms would hand Meta content for free that other AI companies pay to license.

Rapid reaction

On Friday, Meta communications chief Andy Stone responded on X that the Nieman Lab report was “false” and that there was “no change to how Meta uses web crawlers.”

Stone said the update aimed to let Meta pull accurate product information from shopping sites for ads, not to scrape news sites. The company also said the crawling language already existed in other Meta terms and was just being gathered in one place.

Late Friday, however, Meta revised the terms and deleted the word “train,” saying the terms cover only its advertising and business products.

“We’ve heard you and want to clarify,” a spokesperson for Meta told POLITICO over the weekend, adding the change was “not about scraping news sites.”

Publishers say that changes little, however. 

Meta has given them verbal assurances that they can keep using its tools without surrendering their content to AI, but the terms themselves don’t guarantee that, the European Publishers Council’s letter says.

“Meta’s supposed Friday night correction is a farce,” said Jason Kint, who heads Digital Content Next, a U.S. publisher group whose members include Axel Springer. “Exactly what you’d expect from a gatekeeper notorious for abusing its market power.”

Others have gone further. 

“This is unscrupulous theft,” Germany’s newspaper and magazine associations said in a joint statement on Tuesday. They want Brussels to block the terms while it reviews them, warning that once articles are copied into AI systems, they can’t be clawed back.

Joseph Bambridge in London contributed reporting.

On Tuesday, US District Judge Zachary Bluestone dismissed the lawsuit Ann Altman filed last year alleging that her brother, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, had sexually abused her throughout her childhood. As reported earlier by The Guardian, the judge wrote that over the past year, Ann had failed to appear for an independent medical examination or meet other deadlines despite warnings that it would result in the case being dismissed.

When the case was filed last year, a statement shared by Sam Altman, his mother, and his brothers said, "Annie has made deeply hurtful and entirely untrue claims about our family, and especially Sam… All of these claim …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance said on Tuesday that the Trump administration was giving right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley $10,000 and launching a $25 million bounty program for members of the public to report fraud.

In December 2025, Shirley published a viral video alleging fraud at daycares in Minnesota that were operated by members of the local Somali community. Shirley lingered in parking lots and asked to enter childcare centers, taking refusals as evidence that the centers weren't actually caring for children. The video quickly went viral, triggering a massive governmental response: Federal immigration agents descended on the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said Tuesday that Brussels would use the next months “to open dialogue” on how to counter U.S. sanctions against the International Criminal Court — resisting calls from lawmakers to take quicker action.

Nearly 60 MEPs from across the political spectrum urged the Commission to intervene swiftly after the White House announced sweeping sanctions against the Hague-based court earlier this month. They want the Commission to activate a legislative shield known as the blocking statute, which would prevent EU firms from complying with U.S. sanctions.

“We should keep all options on the table. If we use the blocking statute, we have one shot and we should do it well. So, it should be well prepared,” Kallas said, calling on firms not to overcomply with sanctions.

Multiple lawmakers continued to push for a faster response in a plenary session in Strasbourg. But while Kallas acknowledged their calls, she said the EU executive would take time “to analyze the full legal implications, to open dialogue and look for solutions.” The sanctions are expected to be implemented after a 180-day delay starting from Oct. 9.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration had already targeted nine judges and the chief prosecutor of the Court, cutting them off from all U.S. service providers, including banking services.

Irish European Affairs Minister Thomas Byrne, who represents Dublin’s presidency of the Council of the EU, told lawmakers that the sanctions delay provides “an opportunity for dialogue, which we should take advantage of while remaining ready to take all necessary measures,” as laid out by EU leaders in a statement issued after their gathering last week.

Washington is openly campaigning to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick,” and urging countries to quit the court’s founding charter. Kallas said that “decisions by Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Venezuela to reject or even withdraw from the ICC risk eroding the foundations of global justice.”

“The ICC is under attack at precisely the moment when we need it the most,” Kallas said, citing the Court’s investigations of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The EU will continue to engage with partners to strengthen the court, she said, warning countries under pressure from the U.S. to leave the body: “This also has clear consequences for their relationship with the European Union.”

“The European Union has practical means to do more,” Kallas said, adding that she would be in the Hague this week.

BRUSSELS — High jet fuel prices could trigger “the biggest increase in airfares, I would say, in history in Europe” next year, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary told reporters Tuesday.

If fuel prices remain twice as high as before the U.S. war against Iran, O’Leary warned ticket prices could rise by up to 20%.

Hedging contracts have locked in fuel prices for much of airlines’ consumption so far. This has helped European carriers avoid sharp ticket price increases, despite jet fuel prices more than doubling following disruptions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz since the war in the Middle East began.

But O’Leary said most European airlines lack significant hedging next year. “As we go out into next year, we’re only 15% hedged at $85 a barrel. Basically, we’re unhedged into the summer of 2027,” O’Leary told POLITICO in an interview ahead of a press conference in Brussels.

Ryanair’s hedging contracts expire in April 2027. “We will still be profitable, although less profitable than currently, if oil prices remain high,” he said.

O’Leary warned that fewer available seats and higher fares could become the new normal as more airlines face financial struggles. “You’re going to see dramatically less capacity this winter and into the summer of 2027.”

Ryanair itself is cutting 20 routes from Belgium this winter as a response to an increase in national aviation taxes, from €2 in 2025 to €7 from January.

The fuel price hike is also intensifying the airline sector’s opposition to EU climate policies, which many carriers argue are adding to their already rising operating costs.

Ryanair had long advocated extending the EU’s Emissions Trading System to all flights to and from the EU, a call O’Leary reiterated on Tuesday.

“It’s indefensible that … Europe’s citizens are paying all these environmental taxes, while the Yanks, the Asians and the Chinese land and take off in Europe completely exempt from their fair share of environmental taxes.” He added that Ryanair would pay €1.5 billion in ETS compliance costs in 2026.

He argued that the ETS should also cover long-haul services operated by European rivals such as Lufthansa and Air France-KLM.

“And why not? Those are the most expensive flights in the world. They’re also the most profitable flights they have, because they’re exempt from Europe’s bullshit environmental taxation,” O’Leary said.

The EU currently applies the ETS to aviation emissions from flights within the European Economic Area, as well as flights to Switzerland and the U.K. The European Commission proposed last summer to extend carbon pricing, starting in 2029, to flights departing the EU for destinations within 5,000 kilometers of Frankfurt Airport, including to North Africa and the Middle East.

The proposal would affect Ryanair’s flights to destinations such as Morocco, while continuing to exempt most long-haul services operated by other airlines to more distant destinations like the U.S. and China.

TikTok was repeatedly warned by its own staffers about risks its platform posed to child safety, according to court records obtained by NPR. The publication reports that employees were frustrated over TikTok executives failing to appropriately act on concerns they raised, including minors bypassing age-restricted content, and appearing in "transactional sexual content" the company could financially benefit from.

The previously unreported depositions of TikTok staffers were filed in federal court in March, and connected to a multi-district litigation initiated in 2022 that brings together hundreds of lawsuits alleging that TikTok, Meta, Snap …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The U.S. has ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and third-party services built using its technology, citing national security concerns.

America’s descent into chaos and depravity was foretold 10 years ago at a press conference. Donald Trump, who had just been nominated for president at the 2016 Republican National Convention, issued an invitation for one of America’s foes to hack the emails of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee for president. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

The call came only days after emails from the Democratic National Committee were released following the hacking of the organization’s computer servers, which was widely assumed to have been perpetrated by Russian agents. As would become the habit over the following decade, many dismissed Trump’s remarks as mere trolling that weren’t intended to be taken seriously. 

This was not the first time he had invoked Russia. Throughout the primary season, Trump had gushed in multiple interviews about Russian President Vladimir Putin and signaled his intentions to draw closer to Putin once in office. Trump even defended the dictator’s extra-judicial killings, blithely explaining, “Our country does plenty of killing.” But the press conference did mark the first time he enlisted Russia as his ally. 

The overtures continued throughout Trump’s first term, most infamously when he sided with Putin during a bilateral meeting over America’s own intelligence agencies, which had found that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. The president suggested an “election integrity” sharing operation between the two countries, a proposal that made it clear Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger. 

Then came Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or of being elected. (His rhetoric often shifted.) He apparently believed that he could get on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and order him to immediately surrender or face his mighty wrath. Needless to say, this did not happen, and since then Trump has grown increasingly frustrated that he’s been shown to be nothing more than a paper tiger, a frustration that has now reached fever pitch due to his abject failure in the Iran war. Desperate for a “win” — by which he means a Russian win — the president is now in the process of completely selling out Ukraine to his good friend Vlad. 

 

In recent days, Trump has signed an executive order temporarily lifting the sanctions on Russian oil. While supposedly done to secure diesel fuel for the United States, which has seen prices skyrocket due to the president’s war of choice with Iran, the act is in practice a sign of goodwill toward Putin, America’s enemy, and will help him fund his war against Ukraine, our erstwhile ally. A few days later, Trump waived several additional sanctions that a bipartisan congressional majority had passed just a few weeks ago at the behest of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who foolishly believed himself to have the president under his control. 

Worse yet, in what will go down as one of the most appalling betrayals by a U.S. president in history, Trump and his good friend Elon Musk apparently sabotaged Ukrainian intelligence by slowing the Starlink and Starshield communications systems the country relies on for its defensive and offensive weapons systems. Russia took swift advantage of the favor and unleashed one of the most massive bombardments of the war, killing civilians and hitting Ukraine’s energy sector. Trump also called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and in an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, the Ukrainian president accused Trump of pushing the country to surrender to Russia.

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Trump has a number of apparent rationales for these moves. He wants to be seen before the midterms to be doing something about the price of gas and diesel. But that is a crisis of his own making due to his misbegotten war in Iran, for which he has no way out that will solve the problem. His ongoing war has altered the global energy markets in ways that are not easily fixed, which was the reason no president before him was stupid enough to attack Iran. So now Trump is blaming Ukraine because it is bombing Russian oil refineries and demanding they stop so that Russia can sell its diesel — and finance its war, which led to the sanctions in the first place. Not to be overlooked is that Russia is a staunch ally of Iran and is helping them fight us, which Trump has waved off as having “nothing.” Some might argue that could constitute providing “aid and comfort” to America’s enemy.

Meanwhile, fingers are being pointed in multiple directions. Musk said the government is to blame for the Starlink/Starshield gambit. According to sources in the Pentagon, the order came from the White House. Trump claimed he doesn’t know anything about it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shrugged that “it just sort of happened.” Now, lest the Europeans get it in their heads that they should try to step up their own defenses by restricting Starlink in favor of a European-based system, the U.S. government is reportedly threatening them with “devastating” or “destructive” economic retaliation.

As a cherry on top of the administration’s full-on embrace of Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported that Putin has floated a summit with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to decide Ukraine’s fate. (On Monday, Trump told reporters he was open to a meeting but denied it would focus on Ukraine, saying he wanted to discuss denuclearization.) If Trump knew any history, he would know that such a meeting would prove to be his Yalta, the trilateral conference between President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin that carved up Europe in the wake of World War II. The summit became widely seen by the right as “the sell-out at Yalta” because the Soviets ended up with Eastern Europe, but things have changed within the GOP. 

The summit is clearly intended to elevate Russia back to superpower status, which it is not in any economic or military sense, and to demonstrate a new order in which Trump, Putin and Xi run the world. In reality, Putin and Xi now have the United States dancing to their tune, handing them power and influence to dominate their respective spheres. 

The president’s flagrant betrayal of Ukraine is an outrage that has seemingly awakened some of the slumbering Republicans who know they are facing a drubbing at the polls in the quickly approaching midterm elections. Whether it will arouse the consciences of enough to truly step up and stop this breach of trust is unknown. But the mere fact that Trump has gone this far to salve his ego, defy his critics by embracing Putin even more fervently and drum up a lame excuse for what may be the worst national security decision in American history leaves this country weaker, poorer and more distrusted around the world. It hardly seems possible, but we have reached yet another new low.

The post Putin has Trump right where he wants him appeared first on Salon.com.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday night that New Yorkers must resist the narrative that an AI takeover is inevitable and demand regulations that protect the public and put power back in their hands.

Today, I’m talking with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who has a lot of thoughts about AI, tech, and privacy.

If you’ve been listening to the show, you know that one of my running theories is that those issues are driving a big and maybe kind of unexpected political realignment — and with the midterms coming up next month, and early voting already underway in a lot of places, the stakes are pretty high right now.

So I asked Gov. Pritzker about all that, and he was surprisingly willing to dive right into the absolute existential weeds of what government is even for. You’ll hear him say — and it’s hard to disagree — that some problems are just collective action problems that require the government to do a lot of work. We can’t solve all these problems one at a time, or even one state at a time. It’s a pretty deep conversation, and we really got into it on a lot of issues.

And of course, I had to ask him: Are the Bears gonna stay in Illinois?

Before we get going, do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday.

Okay: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Here we go.

Gov. JB Pritzker, you’re the governor of Illinois. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks, Nilay. Great to be with you.

I am very excited to talk to you. We’re in the heart of midterm season. You are running for reelection. I have to tell you. I have to be very honest with you. I personally feel a lot of pressure in this interview, not only because I’m speaking to a governor, but because I went to school in Chicago. My sister still lives in Chicago. My wife grew up in Illinois. Her entire family is farmers in North Central Illinois. Boy, do I have a list of questions for you. I have to do a good job here.

Well, we’re claiming you. Now that I know all that, we’re claiming you. You’re an Illinoisan.

I don’t know about that. I grew up in Wisconsin. Here’s my first question for you. I’m a die-hard Packers fan. Are you going to let the Bears move to Indiana?

That is not our intention. We are, in fact, in discussions with the Bears and the NFL about keeping the Bears either in Chicago or in Arlington Heights, but in Illinois.

I’m saying, as a Packers fan, nothing is funnier than the outcome of the Bears moving to Indiana. I just want to put that out there. Openly biased in this case — I own two shares of that stock — but I’m going to make the comparison here. And the reason I started there is not only because I think that’s a funny outcome, although I do, but it feels like we are in the middle of a generational political realignment.

I’m sure you feel that, in this election campaign, the idea of big business and how that should interact with the government, and how the government should be able to push back on big business and not give in to big business. All of that feels up for grabs.

And the comparison I will make in this specific case is your fellow governor, Gavin Newsom, in California. They sued the Ellison family, Paramount, over the Warner Brothers merger. Paramount threatened to leave. They made a lot of noise about Nashville, Texas, Miami, or wherever you make noise about these days, and it feels like Newsom caved. It feels like he pressured his Attorney General, Rob Bonta, to settle that lawsuit and keep them there.

They settled the lawsuit. The next day, the Ellison family is like, “We never… We’re from California. We would never leave.” I see a parallel here with the Bears that is connected to that larger realignment, how government and business should interact. Do you see that parallel? Do you feel that realignment?

Well, what I can tell you is we’re pretty tough negotiators in Chicago and Illinois, and that’s really what we’re in the midst of now with the Bears. But I understand your point about realignment. I mean, there is a generational change, and I think it’s also an attitudinal change about protecting taxpayers, protecting people who frankly are among the most vulnerable to all the technology that’s overtaking people’s lives and invading people’s homes.

And so I do believe that the government has to be more active now and become a fighter for our people and not just a collaborator with business on everything. I’m a businessman, as you know, before I became governor. But I also know that, for the people of Illinois anyway, my job is to protect the working people of this state who often don’t have anybody protecting them except a government that will stand up for them. So that’s kind of the realignment that I see.

And that generational shift, I agree with you. It’s partly a Democratic Party generational shift. Generationally, we’re a little more aggressive. And I’m probably older than the next generation that’s already possibly taking office this November. I’m 61 years old, but I think of myself as having come out of the tech world and as somebody who has been a fighter for progressive values that, yeah, we’ve got to become more aggressive and make sure we’re standing up for our people.

There are two places where I see the realignment in particular. One is data centers, one is privacy, and you just see that as a bipartisan backlash to those things. I would actually add a third, which is antitrust broadly. It’s weird if you go into Silicon Valley. David Sacks is retweeting Lina Khan from the Biden administration talking about whether the AI industry needs an antitrust exemption to manage safety.

They both agree that these companies don’t need antitrust exemptions. They actually should be more competitive. Again, putting that in the context of regulating these companies, thinking about the dynamic between the government and the biggest companies in the world. I’ll just ask the question, I guess, more directly. Do you think Newsom was right to give in to Paramount, or do you think he should have forced them to make good on that threat to leave?

I can’t speak to the Paramount situation well enough to give you an answer, so it would be unfair for me to do so. I can say once again that our orientation today — and I think about the big AI companies and the big social media companies as well — has to be like, wait a minute, too much power in too few hands.

Particularly when we talk about AI, where it’s potentially existential, but certainly transformative, which is probably a kind way to say it about the economy, that we’re going to have to get very engaged. Guardrails, of course, on both parts, but also addressing what I think on the AI front is potentially a significant change in employment in the United States. I’m not somebody who is necessarily convinced that we have to see a whole bunch of job loss, but that does feel like that’s the direction this is going.

What I’m suggesting is we better be prepared, and we better be protecting people who are going to lose their jobs, or at least it appears they’re going to lose their jobs. And I’ll just give you this thought. If these days 4 percent unemployment is kind of the acceptable near full employment number, I think the problem we’re going to see is — if that’s sort of the level that we’re going to hopefully aim for and stay at — that in very short order, we could end up at 7 percent and have that be the baseline, or maybe 10 percent.

And if you think about what’s happened, the upheavals of economies and of governments when you get to 10 percent unemployment in any country. We better be focused on how we’re going to give people the dignity of work and enough income so that they can make a life for themselves when you’re going to put people out of work by virtue of this technology. By the way, much of the benefit of that is going to go to a very, very few people. So we’ve got to wrestle with that and come to a conclusion.

I wanted to start with some of the brinksmanship we have seen in the negotiations between, particularly, states and the big companies, because that brinksmanship is real. The threat is we will leave. We just covered, I don’t know, Kevin O’Leary in Utah talking about data centers, and the people of Utah really pushed back against Kevin O’Leary building that data center. But his argument was, “Well, I’m just going to shop around.”

This is what states do. They compete with tax incentives and benefits, maybe for data centers, which will put everyone out of a job. They compete for land use rights. You’ve got a rural state with a lot of farms in it. How are you thinking about that dynamic? Do you feel like you’re in competition with the other states, or is this bipartisan realignment creating more of a level playing field where these companies are going to have to actually give something?

We are in competition. We just are because it isn’t bipartisan, at least if you ask me. Unless there is a change in the government. I’ll pick on Texas for a second, and there is a chance that you’ll see a new governor in Texas as of November 3rd. In fact, a good chance. But if you look at Texas as it’s run today by a three-term, hoping to be a four-term, Republican governor and a Republican legislature, they have no intention of changing their alignment about incentives.

In the state of Illinois, we don’t want to have to do that. I mean, we obviously want to protect the revenue that we’ve got for the state to pay for the things we think are valuable to our people, but we also want to make sure that we’re attracting jobs and not losing jobs. And in a world where South Carolina, Michigan, Texas, Florida — pick your poison. Michigan may be slightly different just because it’s got democratic control, but these are our competitors. When I’m competing to have a company move to Illinois, I’ve got to make sure, first of all, that I’m somewhere in the ballpark when it comes to the incentives, because otherwise we don’t even get considered.

And then when I say somewhere in the ballpark, I mean, I want to give away less than more, and then I want to provide whatever other advantages I can that aren’t financial so that I can protect the resources that we have. An example of that is, we like to talk about a kind of white-glove service that we offer to companies. If you’re going to bring a factory here, let’s say, just to give an example, we want to make sure that we’ve got somebody who’s kind of a concierge for your company that’s walking you through each of our departments where you need a permit. It doesn’t mean we’re lowering the standards. It just means, a lot of times, the bureaucracy eats up so much time that it makes it impossible for a company to actually do what they want to do in your state.

We try to make sure that if we’re going to attract a large company, with 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 jobs, that we’re at least making it a little easier for them to go through without having to give them massive tax incentives. So that’s the way I think about it. We are in competition. There’s just no doubt about it. Should we be? There’s a lot of discussion about whether we shouldn’t, and maybe at the federal level we should do something about leveling the playing field, but this is the world we’re living in right now.

I wanted to ask those questions just to set the baseline. I really do think something is happening. A lot of young people are dissatisfied with the status quo. A lot of people in general are dissatisfied with what big tech companies are trying to do with AI, with the potential for job loss.

And the relationship between the people, the government, and those companies seems more fraught than ever, especially as they’re trying to expand their physical infrastructure with data centers, as they all become defense contractors, literally taking our tax dollars to sell weapon systems and collect data for the government. That’s a big swirl.

I wanted to start there, but I just want to take one second here and ask you the Decoder questions because I personally think the operation of government is so opaque. It’s very easy to figure out how big companies are run. The CEOs won’t shut up. They’re on podcasts all day long. I think most people have no idea how your job works.

So you were elected governor. How is your office set up, and how have you structured the state government of Illinois?

Just starting from where I sit, and then, of course, we look at it from a customer service perspective. But starting just at the top, I actually did something that no governor of Illinois has ever done — which is that I created not just one deputy governor. We obviously have a lieutenant governor who’s elected also, but a deputy governor is somebody getting appointed by me to serve under me, to help manage the government with me. What I did was put four deputy governors in place, a general counsel, and my chief of staff.

Why is that important? Because what I’ve tried to do is to break down the silos of government. I took all of the health and human services-related departments — that’s the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, the Department of Healthcare and Family Services, everything from health insurance, Medicaid, and public health during the pandemic — and put it all under one deputy governor working directly for me. The idea is that instead of my having, let’s say, 26 direct reports, I’ve got four or five direct reports plus my chief of staff, who each have, let’s say, six or seven departments underneath them.

From my perspective, what I wanted to do was make sure that I’m breaking down the silos of government, making these departments that are often building walls, and they don’t want to talk to one another because they’re afraid they might lose jobs in one department to another department, or lose control of a program if they’re talking to one another. That’s the way it used to be. Now we’re like the deputy governor is there to either beat the heads together or at least bring them together so that they will be operating the government more efficiently. Okay, so that’s from the top.

From the bottom, which is: how do people who live in Illinois interact with the state government? And obviously, technology is one of the upgrades that’s occurred and made it easier. Illinois, frankly, had not significantly invested in those processes before I became governor, or in the technology that was necessary. And I’ll just give you one example of this: We created something called BEACON, which is designed to address the problem that parents and families have with mental health for children. It turns out that there were seven different ways in which people approached the government to get help, and we weren’t coordinating those, and we weren’t helping to provide all of the resources.

I’m talking about outside resources. How do you find a therapist? How do you find a psychiatrist? And how do you pay for those things? Medicaid, if you can’t afford it on your own. But the point is, there’s one door to enter through BEACON that allows you to get access to all of those resources, even if they’re in multiple departments. So that’s just one example. We’re trying to think of this as a customer service operation. It’s one thing to say this is how the org chart looks and another thing to say, this is how you access all the resources of the government that you need.

We provide programs that really matter to people. We have a birth equity initiative to reduce maternal mortality, particularly in Black and Brown communities. And free diapers for some people. The problem is, people don’t even know that the programs exist, and how would you ever figure out that the programs exist, especially if you’re a working person who’s working two minimum-wage jobs? You don’t have any time, and you don’t have any money, and you don’t even know how to talk to the government. And so we’re trying to fix all of those problems of the government with the way that we interact with people.

It’s funny. It feels like that is one of the bigger opportunities when it comes to AI, just letting the AI navigate a bureaucracy for you and communicate what resources are available. The flip side of that is that people hate AI. They truly dislike it, and it doesn’t feel like that connection has been made — that a lot of these tools can actually just navigate a bureaucracy for you. Are you thinking that should be an investment that you make, that it might be what turns the tide in terms of how people feel about these tools?

Yes, but I’m not plunging headlong into it. And I realize that there are probably states that are plunging headlong into it.

I mean, the United States government rolled out its AI chatbot to look at webpages across the government.

Well, there you go.

I guess what I’m trying to do is make sure that… I created something called the AI Cabinet in my government, and that is to essentially bring the experts on AI together with the leaders of my mainstay agencies of state government, so that we’re thinking about privacy, safety, and efficiency. And those things have to be talked about together. You can’t just say we’re going after efficiency and we don’t really care about the other two.

So that’s the idea, the AI cabinet. It’s also that, honestly, there are things, as you know, about AI that are dangerous. And so we’ve got our emergency management agency on that AI cabinet. We’ve got our state police on that AI cabinet. And remember, a lot of the people that work in those agencies aren’t particularly proficient at AI or really understand the potential and the potential dangers.

That’s why we brought in experts, for example, from the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, just as two examples of places where we’re drawing expertise. So yeah, there’s a lot to be done. I would say we’re trying to approach it carefully before it gets out of control to a point where we have no way to pull it back in.

The other Decoder question I ask everybody is about decisions. You have a big job. You have some constraints in your decision-making process, right? There’s a state legislature, there’s a federal government, you have other agencies in your state. How do you make decisions? What’s your framework?

Well, I don’t do it the way Donald Trump does.

It’s funny you say it that way. I guess I start with the idea that we have a problem to solve and that decisions have to get made. Are those decisions ones that need to come to the governor? Because you’re right, I only have so much bandwidth. So the question is: which are the most serious ones that can’t be solved by other people, or are unlikely to get the outcomes that I would want by handing them over to other people? And then those automatically come to me.

So what I’m making decisions about is kind of the first answer to your question, and then it’s how do I actually make the decisions? For me, I am not one of those people who thinks that I’m right 100 percent of the time. Maybe a good way to describe it, and I’m joking a little bit when I say it, is that I’m 90 percent sure I’m right, but there’s also a 10 percent chance that I’m dead wrong. I want to make sure that I’m getting input and a debate before I actually make the final decision.

Someone once told me that the best CEOs are ones that, in their organization, are a little bit below average in terms of their capability and intellect. I’m not saying we want below-average leaders. I’m just saying you’re so good at hiring that you’ve got people in your organization who are really far better than you are at various things that you’re not particularly good at. Maybe knowing what you don’t know and being willing to ask for help is a philosophy that I have. Be willing to ask for help if it’s something you really don’t know.

And I’ll be honest, when you become governor of a state, there are a whole lot of topics within the purview of a governor. Making decisions about all those topics, maybe a human being who has super intelligence might be able to do it, but most people don’t start out knowing everything there is to know about public health, public safety, and education. And so you start out with what you know and then try to add expertise to it and then make decisions based upon the best experts debating one another in front of you. At least that’s how I like to do it.

Give me an example. Governor Kathy Hochul from New York was on the show. She said in her first week she needed to declare a state of emergency because of a hurricane, and she just didn’t know how, which was very humanizing in its way. Give me an example of when you became governor, and there was something where you just didn’t know.

COVID.

Sure.

I mean, honestly, no one runs for governor thinking there’s going to be a global pandemic. You think you’re going to solve education problems for people or put more money in people’s pockets by raising the minimum wage or whatever, but COVID comes along. And I have to admit, the level of expertise, I don’t think any governor… Well, maybe Josh Green, the doctor who’s the governor of Hawaii, maybe he had a lot to [of expertise] start with — but for the rest of us humans, that was one where we were learning on the job.

We were working 18 hours per day. My entire team was all in, and we had to do things like emergency procurement of ventilators and masks, and we had to go outside the box. It’s not like we could just put it through our central management services, look for a contract, or whatever. This was like, I need masks in three days.

I’ll tell you a quick story, if you’re interested, about my interaction with Donald Trump at the time because I think it’s interesting, anyway. But I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump, in case you didn’t know. I was one year into office when the COVID pandemic hit, and I had not… I mean, I talked to his administration, but I didn’t talk to him directly. So I picked up the phone and called him, and I said, “Mr. President.” By the way, I wrote a script for myself because I know he likes to be flattered, and I’m not somebody who normally likes to flatter him, but I wrote a script for myself. I saved it; I even have it today.

And I said, “Mr. President, you’re a great businessman, but you can understand that paying $8 for an N95 mask that should cost us 75 cents means we’re in a national emergency. We need to be able to get these things and afford them, and I’m competing against all the other states. We need to invoke the Defense Production Act in order to make sure that we’re making enough masks in the United States.” That’s what I told him. And then I said, “But I need masks right now. What can you do for me?” I said, “I need 2 million N95 masks, and I need 4,000 ventilators.” And he never delivered, just so you know, even though he promised that he would deliver.

The challenges in COVID were mighty, and the organization that we had to create around it… I had meetings every morning just on this topic, figuring out, okay, how many hospital beds [are available]? We didn’t have a system that would tell us statewide how many hospital beds are available in each region. What happens if you have an outbreak and it really is overtaking some region? What do we do?

And so these were all the things we had to learn on the fly. And all I can tell you is, once again, back to hiring great people to have around you, I really felt like I proved that I had done a good job of hiring because the people around me were tremendous. One of whom, by the way, is now running as my lieutenant governor partner in this election.

It’s interesting you brought up COVID in the context of our conversation about generational political realignment. I would actually point to COVID as the beginning of a particular realignment around what the government should measure, how much control the government should have over people, and all of that has led, I think, directly into the bipartisan pushback against Flock cameras.

The very notion of privacy is not, in my mind, left or right anymore. The CEO of Flock got himself in all kinds of trouble because he kept saying all the people who wanted to ban Flock cameras are criminals, and he would go on MAGA media and say this. I think that position was just rejected. We can see in states around the country that there’s pushback against Flock cameras. I would point to COVID as the beginning of that.

The idea that the government could be too intrusive, and in particular, the government should not be able to measure things. “If you don’t test, there won’t be COVID” just became an idea. And the idea that we shouldn’t measure things, or we should tear down our systems of measurement, is a big part of the second Trump administration. But I see that privacy connection very clearly to COVID. In one world, the government coming together to protect its citizens and build a bunch of systems could have gone a very different way. In the one we live in, there’s ferocious pushback to that, on the left and the right in some ways. How do you feel about privacy right now?

I know Illinois leads the nation. You’ve got the Biometric Identification Protection Act. Every time I fly to Chicago, I’ve got to push the button at the airport to say that it’s okay to look at my face. That’s one way of going about it. But then you do have, I think, hundreds of Flock cameras in Cook County alone. People have Meta glasses with cameras in them. There’s something happening with privacy that is running right into the aftershocks of COVID and how people feel about government intrusion. How are you finding a way through that balance?

Well, and don’t forget AI.

Yep.

As you’re suggesting. I mean, talk about a collision. This focus on privacy is warranted and long overdue, to be honest with you. I understand what you’re describing about COVID, but I think something that came out of COVID got accelerated, and that was conspiracy theories.

Yes.

And I’m not suggesting that everything you hear now about the pushback around privacy is a conspiracy theory, but it is easy for these things to spread, and people have misinformation that’s informing them about how these things are used. Having said that, I guess what I think is that we are having to solve multiple problems at the same time, and that AI is coming.

Let’s just go to AI for a second. It’s here. I mean, I say it’s coming, but it’s here. It’s not going to stop. We’re not going to become Luddites without any AI. So the question is, in the context of privacy, what guardrails are we putting on AI, and how are we managing it? This idea that the president and David Sacks had, where they got all the companies together and said, “Hey, how about you guys self-police?” That’s not going to work, at least not for protecting people’s privacy. And frankly, it’s not going to provide any safety either because everybody’s going to operate in their own self-interest. It’s one of the reasons why you need a government, in my view.

I’m not suggesting the government is any smarter than these companies. But one of the reasons you have any kind of collective action of the government is because, separately, as you know, people operate in their own self-interest. I mean, you could have a Hobbesian world where people are killing each other, and there are no rules about it. So I think we’ve got to use the government as a tool and also be smart within the government. And that’s where the generational change, I think, is hugely important. Use the government as a smarter, less bureaucratic collection of people devoted to protecting the privacy of everyone and making sure that we’re addressing all the other challenges that come from AI.

So I guess I’ll just say, I don’t think we’re anywhere near where we need to be, but I will say, if we don’t have a federal government, now I’ve got a lot of… I’m very proud of the things that we’ve done here in Illinois around the AI Safety Measures Act, which is the toughest in the country, the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, and so on. I’m proud of the work we’ve done, but state by state, this is not the way to do this. We’re doing the best we can in the absence of a federal government that is addressing these issues.

And when I say federal government, I’m not just pointing at Trump. I’m pointing at Congress. No action on their part means that we’re going at it alone. And right now, I don’t know how many AI safety measure acts have been passed, but it looks like three to me. I mean, it’s New York, California, and Illinois. Maybe you could name a couple of others, but we three were the first. And yet, we’ve got 47 other states.

This worries me a great deal. You’re raising issues, and I’d love to tell you I have all the answers. I can tell you what we’re trying to think about is that we are the… People sometimes say that the states are laboratories of democracy. They’re actually laboratories of policy, and we are trying to, at least in Illinois, use ourselves as a laboratory for policy while not creating disadvantage for ourselves. And so that’s a very challenging thing to do, and why we need to change what’s happening at the federal government.

Focus on privacy for one second. I understand what you’re saying about AI. I think part of the privacy debate around Flock cameras, for example, is, well, sure, you can have one license plate reader in one intersection. And if the cops had to go there and pull the SD card out of it, drive it back to headquarters, upload it to their Apple IIe, and look at it manually, maybe people would feel one way about it.

But those cameras are all networked. They don’t have any access controls really. There are infinite reports of local police chiefs tracking their girlfriends across state lines with these cameras. You add in a system like Palantir, which can synthesize multiple databases and do all kinds of tracking across all kinds of systems. People see that.

The turn that is being made is that you can connect a lot of databases of information together, search them without a warrant, and track people across the entire country. You could ban that state by state. You could regulate it city by city, which we’re seeing happen with Flock, and you could maybe have some federal controls around privacy there. None of it’s really happening, but on the ground, people are ferociously pushing back. And that’s the connection I’m making to COVID, conspiracy theories, and how much power the government should have to surveil you and look at you.

Something happened in there where people’s attitudes about that really shifted. And I would say one of my core beliefs is that Americans do not like being told what to do. Party politics aside, Americans don’t like being told what to do. Something about that flipped and connected to: we have a network of license plate-reading cameras, and we’re going to tear them down when we see them because there’s something about that that offends us as Americans.

Illinois does have privacy laws. I think the last update to the biometric law you did was in 2024, and it has changed again. It’s gotten more vociferously opposed to tracking and surveillance in this country. Do you think you need another update to that privacy law?

I think we should be looking at that question every year. I’ll give you an example of it. We passed it, and again, I’m back to AI because I think how you’re describing it was a perfect way to say it. If it was an SD card that they had to go grab and then analyze back at the station, it’d be a different thing. But it’s AI that’s operating these things, and that’s allowing this stuff to move instantaneously and track people.

Look, should we be addressing it? Yeah, every year. It’s like the issue of ethics in government. What I mean is, the minute you put an ethics law in place, there’s somebody who’s trying to get around it. I mean, every year, it’s like every law… this is probably true across all of capitalism, maybe. There are always people trying to find a way around the law. Put a tax law in place, and someone’s trying to figure out how to get around it. And I think the point you’re making is that that’s why you need to have a proactive government, less bureaucratically and more aggressively trying to address these things. Are we going to be able to keep up with it? I’ll be honest, I don’t think so. And I also don’t think you can say, “Well, we’re just going to shut it all down” because there are things you’re missing out on.

It’s sort of like, and again, I keep going back to AI, but I think a lot about it. My children are 21 and 24. They’re going to live to 100 or 110 years old because AI is going to solve a whole bunch of medical challenges, and already is. There’s a cure now for sickle cell anemia, and people who would otherwise die at 25 or 30 years old are going to live full lives. This is going to happen across the board in cancer and everything else. And so there’s all good in there, and then there’s the bad. So I know what you’re saying. I guess all I can tell you is I’m a believer that we can progressively — I don’t mean that in a political fashion — address these challenges.

In Illinois, we passed a law that disallows the use of AI in therapy for people because we think too much information gets collected, not enough humanity in the process, and we think that it should have humanity in it. Again, we’re not trying to shut it down across the board, but we’re going to have to see how it gets used and where it’s improper.

And I know that sounds imperfect because the technology is moving so fast that the idea that we’re going to be able to keep up with all the ways in which someone’s privacy could be breached seems very difficult, but I don’t know any other way to do it. That’s why you have a government, and maybe in the end we’re going to have this competing use of things like AI, where AI is monitoring AI, and AI that’s kind of privacy-friendly or focused on privacy is going to be monitoring the AI that’s not. But again, I know you don’t want to just talk about AI.

I am concerned. This issue of privacy has been around for a long time. You’ve been talking about it, I’m sure; I’ve been talking about it since before AI. This is like everybody giving over their personal information in exchange for access to something. And that was happening for a while, and then we’re all getting ads that are personalized to us based on stuff that we’ve essentially given up privacy for.

No, it’s funny. People believe, and we can write as many stories as we want about how your iPhone is not actually listening to you, but the ad tracking is so good that everyone believes that their iPhones are listening to them. The next turn is that it is now technologically feasible for these systems to listen to you all the time. And I can’t fall back on the idea that it’s cheaper for them to do the ad tracking when you hit I accept than to listen to you all the time, which was, for a decade, the right answer.

The economically correct answer was that ad tracking was cheaper than listening to you all the time. That might be very different in the future. There are already devices that we cover here at The Verge that purport to listen to you all the time and turn that into some actionable data. And it feels to me like the tech industry is trying to drive a truck through our privacy law, through our lack of AI regulations, through an entire system of governance that is designed for the pre-AI era.

The notion that you don’t have privacy in public worked really well when everyone didn’t have a cell phone that could connect to the cloud and instantly search every photo all at once, all the time, and do facial recognition. We live in that world now. I would say the public sentiment towards the idea that you don’t have privacy in public places has turned.

They don’t like the Meta glasses. They call them pervert glasses for a reason. And somewhere in there is, well, the federal government should pass privacy law. It is a failure of imagination in the United States. We don’t have federal privacy law. And then somewhere in there is the notion that the states are laboratories of democracy and policy.

It is amazing, by the way, how often on this tech and business show, Thomas Hobbes comes up and the very notion that the government is there to serve as an extension of us solving collective action problems. It comes up over and over again because I think the tech industry does not want to respect that dynamic.

This is why I started with that relationship between government and business, and the pushback and the negotiation, because here it feels like the tech industry is in a bubble of its own making. Truly, in a media bubble of its own making. And then all of the polling is, well, we hate AI. In particular, young people hate AI. And then all of the action is around data centers where NIMBYism, the most American of policy levers, is being pulled to keep these data centers out of communities. And that’s one way to stop AI.

You just pulled back on data center tax incentives in July. You’re pushing the state legislature to adopt a suite of guarantees on reforms for new construction. Do you think data centers and the pushback on data centers is an effective route towards AI regulation?

No, I don’t. I think it’s an effective route toward data center regulation. I know that people have conflated and put together their opposition to data centers with their opposition to AI. And a lot of people can’t describe why they’re opposed to one or the other because they’re conflated with one another. But I can say that — I mean, at least our aim is focused on the idea, and people really feel this, right, and there’s real data to back this up — the data centers themselves put aside what they’re doing inside a data center.

The data centers and what’s happening are eating up the available electricity, and that’s causing your electric bill to go up. At least that’s how everybody feels. There are a lot of things that we should have been doing in many years gone by to get to a point where electricity bills shouldn’t have to go up now. And that has to do with building out the grid. It’s a world where regulation and cross-border challenges have made it nearly impossible for a lot of the grid to get built the way that it should have. We produce a lot more electricity in the United States than we use, but we just don’t transport it well enough, and we would have a lot more available if we transported it better.

Okay, but even if you think that can’t happen efficiently, we need to build more capacity on the grid. My only point is the opposition to data centers is, in part, a result of the economic situation that’s happening right now in the country, where electric bills, gas, rent, everything has gone up. Your electric bill shows up every month, and it continues to go up, and people kind of scratch their heads and say, “Who am I paying for?” This is happening, and this is particular to Illinois.

We’re not going to have a whole discussion about energy policy, but I could just say this: We produce more nuclear power in the state of Illinois than any other state. Roughly 53 or 54 percent of our electricity comes from nuclear power, and we’re a net electricity exporter. So we have an excess in Illinois, but our bills are going up, and that’s because of the methodology of the regional transmission organizations. Again, not to get into all the details of it, but essentially, if Ohio decides to build a hyperscale data center, our bills in Illinois are affected, and that’s shocking to people who live in Illinois. But what they know is they don’t want their bill to go up, so they don’t want another data center nearby — even though the one in Ohio is actually causing the problem, even if you choose to oppose data centers.

So this is a challenge. I think there’s a lot of information that needs to be spread. But most of all, we just need a whole lot more capacity and a whole lot more grid that will, I think, subside some of the concern about data centers. To your point, privacy is, I think, more related to AI than data centers. And it’s not just AI, but the way AI is used. So we’re going to have a lot of opposition. You make an excellent point. I think this feeling of being out of control — you are not in control of your environment anymore — that’s the thing that is causing anxiety.

I want to go back to something really important that I was saying earlier. We need better people running for public office. We need smarter policy development in government. And part of that is a generational shift that’s needed and a better understanding. We have people who are serving in the United States Senate who have no idea. Was it the Secretary of Education, Trump’s Secretary of Education, who called it A1? I mean, because we’ve got older people who don’t have any exposure who are making policy theoretically on these things, and it should disturb us all. It’s one of the reasons we’ve got to advance the cause of better people and better systems in government.

We are on the cusp of an election. There might be a new Congress. There might be new leadership in Congress. There are a bunch of old Democrats too. In fact, I could probably point directly to Joe Biden’s age in the last election as the reason that he lost. Do you think that you need a wholesale change of leadership of the older Democrats as well?

You said, “Do we need a wholesale change?” I mean, I can tell you that I don’t think we should be telling —

Well, now I live in New York. I’ll just ask you, do you think Chuck Schumer should be the Senate majority leader if the Democrats take the Senate?

That’s a decision people in the Senate are going to make. I have no influence over it. I can tell you this: I am opposed to term limits because I think that you should have all the choices. You’re a voter. If you want to vote for the 75-year-old, I mean, go ahead.

I’m just suggesting that a great case could be made for the 45-year-old who’s just as smart as the 75-year-old was when he was 45, or maybe is now, but has a modern look at the issues around AI privacy, everything else we’re discussing, and a more aggressive view of how we ought to be reining in big corporations in their invasion of our lives. But I think people ought to make their own choices. I mean, for us to say, “Well, we should have an age limit. You’re 70, that’s it, you’re out.” I think that belies who we are as a democracy.

Well, you convinced me. I’m 46. I’m announcing my run for president here with you, Governor. That was a rousing speech.

Listen, I would vote for you in a second if the choice was you and Donald Trump.

A low bar, but I’m glad I crossed it.

Let me tie two ideas together at the end. We’ve talked a lot about AI regulation. You mentioned social media regulation a little bit earlier in this conversation. I know that Illinois has a social media law. You have a bell-to-bell ban on phones in schools for kids.

I’m just going to pick on Mark Zuckerberg. It’s easy to pick on Mark Zuckerberg. If you look at how he talks about social media regulation, he basically describes the tragedy of the commons. You signed the landmark settlement with him. I think Illinois is due to get $750 or $760 million out of that settlement. And a big part of it is that TikTok and YouTube have to agree to the same terms, and then Meta will pay the rest of the money. And Zuckerberg very clearly has said that’s because if Instagram falls back on engagement bait and TikTok doesn’t, the kids will just use TikTok. And so the government has to get everyone to agree.

I will tell you that Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, does not agree. He’s not going to sign onto this. That’s one whole fight. Look at how Mark Zuckerberg talks about AI regulation. There’s none of that dynamic at all. He’s like, “It should be a free-for-all. We’ll all compete. If it’s not safe, the market will tell us. We’ll be fine.” And in my mind, these ideas are at total odds with each other.

In the market where he makes all the money, the government has to step in and stop him from hurting kids because apparently there’s no market demand for safe social media. And in the market where the AI CEOs are telling us they might kill us all if we don’t stop them, it’s a free-for-all, and the market will tell us if they accidentally kill everybody. How do you reconcile those things? Are you just happy that you got the social media case done after a decade of failing to regulate social media, or do you think you can solve AI with regulation this time instead of letting it just cook?

Look, I’m an optimist at heart, so I’m not going to suggest to you that I absolutely know that we can solve all the problems that we’re now facing, but I don’t know what else we can do. Other than, again, progressively making sure that we’re trying to address each of these things, trying to anticipate them to the extent we can. Can we be faster than AI is developing? I don’t know. But we can’t stop trying. I know that. And I would suggest to you that my optimism is founded because I think the vast majority of people want what you’re describing, which is reining it in.

And again, without destroying companies. I don’t think we’re all trying to do that. What we’re trying to do is stop the invasion into our home, stop the invasion into our children’s lives. I do think we can do that, but that’s because we’ve solved a whole lot of huge problems. That’s kind of like my answer to: is AI potentially existential? The answer, of course, is yes. And can we solve it? I don’t know. Nuclear weapons… I mean, just to give something of an analogy to something else. I mean, nuclear weapons are still hanging over us as a danger to humanity. And so far anyway, we’ve managed not to blow up the world. I don’t know whether that gives you any optimism, but it does to me.

We, as a country, can figure out how we want to rein it in here. That we, as a country, can work with our allies to figure out how we want to collectively try to rein it in. And then we have enemies in the world and competitors in the world, and we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to… Maybe it’s mutually assured destruction, like it was with nuclear weapons, but these are all things we’re going to have to work on, and work on fast.

And it’s scary because someone analogized this to… I mean, think about the early 1950s when every kid had to learn that if there was a nuclear blast, an atomic bomb that went off, get under your desk. That wouldn’t have been very effective. But the point is, people lived with the idea that a terrible nuclear holocaust could occur with a nuclear explosion. And so I think we’re heading into that world again with AI. I hope I didn’t stray too much from your question, but —

Let me ask you this, and it’s a little bit of a wild card here at the end.

We cover this industry so closely here, and the big difference with nuclear weapons is that there weren’t five companies building bleeding-edge nuclear weapons in private capacity, led by five guys who all hated each other. But that’s the dynamic of the AI industry. They all truly hate each other, and they’re all trying to make as much money as they can as fast as they can.

And then some of them think the AI is alive. If you ask Anthropic, and we’ve done this, “Is Claude alive?” They don’t say no. They will argue with you about the definition of alive and suggest that, to them, alive means having a biological component and Claude doesn’t have that, but it might be conscious.

There’s a race to build AGI in the industry. Some people truly believe they’re building alien minds that have a different kind of consciousness. I’m not sure any government at any level has ever had to regulate that, or has ever come up against an industry that is religious about the fact that it might be building the next kind of intelligence.

Where do you stand? Do you think that they’re building a next kind of consciousness that stands alongside humans, or do you think that this is normal technology as some others do?

Boy, that is really another podcast for us, but I’ll just say this one thing: I just want to disagree with you for a second. Nobody could ever imagine a nuclear weapon either. And…

But the government built nuclear weapons. It wasn’t —

I understand. I’m not suggesting it’s the same. I’m suggesting it’s so new at the time that figuring out how you’re going to rein it in… Because remember, it’s not just one government, and the same thing with AI. It’s not just those five guys either. I mean, it’s like there’s somebody in China. Maybe five of those. I don’t know, and somebody in Europe or whatever. You could say we’re ahead, or they’re ahead. I don’t know.

But all I’m saying is, yeah, this is a proliferated situation and it’s not government-controlled. One hundred percent, you’re right; it’s not like nuclear weapons in that sense. But it is like nuclear weapons in the sense that nobody’s ever seen it before. It’s a complete mystery to start with. How are we going to rein it in? I mean, nobody thought Russia was going to get the bomb, and they got it. We’ve figured out somehow how to deal with it.

Again, you’ve got to be an optimist to believe we can end up with the right solution here. I don’t know that we have the answer to “how do we rein it in?” I will say, though, that if we had the power to create it, we have the power, in my view, to rein it in. Is it conscious? You’re asking a deep question.

Have you felt the AGI?

I mean, do you think it’s conscious? Because I understand why people think it might have consciousness or it’s going to be conscious. But I think that’s why the ethicists and technologists need to be involved. And especially, in my view, the government’s got to be involved because how else are you going to rein in the five guys and the companies that have developed this? There is no other way.

I will tell you, I don’t think it’s conscious. And every now and again, you have an experience where it’s blindingly clear why other people believe that. When you watch a reasoning model take 90 steps over an hour and arrive at a conclusion, it’s impressive, and you can see why people believe that. I do not, and I have a lot of reasons for that.

It just occurs to me that if you set out to regulate a technology like this, if you believe one thing, you would maybe go down one path. And if you believe that you were building a consciousness, you might go down another.

Again, the whole industry itself does not agree on this. Jensen Huang and Dario Amodei do not agree on whether it’s alive. Jensen just wants to sell a bunch of chips, and he will happily tell you it’s just technology and you can control it. I think Dario thinks he’s building AGI, and that’s a different… There’s a whole reason he proposes different kinds of regulatory structures there. I’m just asking you, have you felt the AGI? Do you think it’s one path or the other?

I’m not going to give you a satisfactory yes or no.

I mean, I haven’t felt it. I guess that’s what I’m… My basic answer is I haven’t felt it.

Governor Pritzker, this was very fun. Thank you for indulging this last existential loop of a question. You’re going to have to come back to Decoder soon.

I would like to do that. Thanks, Nilay.

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